What Would Katharine Hepburn Do?

Still, Here

2011-09-25T23:22:00.000-04:00

New York City is a series of gifts that you keep opening as long as you live here.

I'm never not amazed by the city. A mere walk to the post office on a Tuesday can be an exercise in geometry, sociology, aromatherapy, and modern dance. But sometimes you're offered an experience that takes you outside—or way inside—the usual-unusual.

Today's gift: stillspotting nyc, a series of architectural/musical installations put on by the Guggenheim that involved moving among different New York City sites (several of them closed to the public, all of the installations created by Swedish architectural firm Snøhetta) to experience a moment of stillness amidst the urban chaos, while listening to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Here's how the stillspotting website describes it:

The staging of five recorded works by Pärt gradually transports visitors from the hustle and bustle of the streetscape to an elevated urban experience that makes them newly aware of their sense of hearing. Visitors can experience this confluence of music and architecture at five separate locations downtown that quietly celebrate the city, ten years after the September 11 attacks.

We didn't make it to the two sites on Governor's Island, but we did visit the three others, starting in Battery Park, where we walked a grassy labyrinth while listening (via iPods and headphones) to Pärt's "Silentium," the second movement of his Tabula Rasa, performed by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra.

What looks like a white comic-strip word balloon at the right edge of the photo is actually a weather balloon; these were the constants in each installation, apparently because they "have a unifying and holistic character and simultaneously create and ignore space."

Like this description, the labyrinth experience was one you could take very seriously or with a grain of salt. Several participants appeared to be in a mild trance...or under the influence. I dutifully walked the concentric circles toward the weather balloon, finding it calmingly mindless; others in our party quickly decamped to a bench and watched the goings-on from a remove. When my three companions were ready to leave before I'd quite finished my trek, I felt sort of guilty at the thought of barging across the bricks that marked my path—so I mimed clambering over a three-foot wall. What can I say? I was under the influence of Arvo Pärt.

We walked north along the Hudson River to the second site: the unoccupied 46th floor of the new World Trade Center 7, the last building to fall on 9/11 and the first to be rebuilt.

The floor was open on all four sides, allowing 360-degree views of the city, the harbor, the Hudson—and an aerial view of the new World Trade Center Memorial.

We were so close to the unfinished 1 World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower) that if I weren't so acrophobic I'd have considered swinging across on a zipline.

1 World Trade Center, reflecting WTC7 and the Woolworth Building.

In this case, the drama of the setting and the kind of unnerving privilege of being, for the moment, a part of the new World Trade Center eclipsed any emotion the music tried to offer. The 3-minute selection ("Hymn to a Great City") played on a continuous New Agey loop, with speakers set among yet more weather balloons and plastic folding chairs.

I preferred a slow meander along the four edges of the 46th floor.

Finally, we walked over to the spectacular 1913 Woolworth Building on Broadway, across the street from City Hall. The legendary lobby is closed to the public (a fact that makes my populist-minded Beloved very grouchy), so it's become an object of frustrated desire for many a tourist (and resident) eager to get a glimpse, only to be shooed out by zealous security guards. Even at a private art event, photographs and video were forbidden, so I've borrowed one from the stillspotting website:

Spatial installation by Snøhetta, music by Arvo Pärt. Installation view: To a Great City at the Woolworth Building, September 15–18 and 22–25, 2011. © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo: Kristopher McKay

We sat on the steps between the marble banisters and the weather balloons and listened to Pärt's "In Principio" for choir and orchestra. I looked up the whole time, trying to memorize the details of the arched mosaic ceiling, the gothic filigree on the walls, the gargoyle-ish faces (one with a snaggletooth), the sculptural caricatures, and the stained glass overhead bearing the names of countries (including Russia and the "German Empire") and the dates 1879 (when the first Woolworth store opened) and 1913 (when the building was completed).

For 19 minutes and 19 seconds, until the last strains of the music faded, I felt completely still, completely mesmerized, and completely grateful for the gifts of this city.

The African Queen: Part 1

2011-06-11T18:05:00.004-04:00

“You can see the ones who’ve been bitten,” said the middle-aged Canadian woman with the close-cropped red hair and the African-print pantsuit. “They come to Africa and never leave.”

She herself was one of the bitten: a former school principal from Ontario who’d visited Tanzania as a volunteer teacher-trainer, then met and married a man from a small village and was now living and working on local projects in Dar-es-Salaam, making $300 a month.

“I can’t believe I have a husband,” she said, shaking her head at the inexplicability of it. “I have a Tanzanian cat.”

We were on a sunset cruise on the Zambezi, staring downriver at the billowing cloud of spray from Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. My Beloved and I had come here for three days following a two-week visit with our friends in South Africa.

The entire trip was a multisensory extravaganza from beginning to end, and I’ll write and post photos separately about the spectacular landscape, the daily adventures, and the wondrous animals—the giraffes, cheetahs, zebras, elephants, kudu, wildebeest… .

I came home with a strong urge to turn right around and fly back (after recovering from the jetlag of the 18-hour flight). I felt that I, too, had been “bitten.” And I thought about two other non-Africans who had come to the continent for one reason and ended up staying for very different ones.

*****

Our innkeeper in Livingstone, Zambia, Lynne Mendelsohn, is a lively Scotswoman who spent many years as a high-priced corporate lawyer in London and Edinburgh. Shortly before her fortieth birthday, she decided to take a yearlong sabbatical to do volunteer work in Zambia and Mozambique. When the sabbatical ended, she half-heartedly returned to her job, and discovered she no longer had the stomach for it.

She quit the firm, bought the Zig Zag B&B in Livingstone, and moved to Zambia permanently with her new Namibian husband.

The Zig Zag has the feeling of a place where NGO workers or foreign correspondents might land between assignments—small motel-like rooms of concrete floors and metal-framed four-posters with mosquito netting; beautiful gardens lush with bougainvillea; two enormous metal giraffe sculptures standing sentinel in the gravel parking lot; and the expansive bar-restaurant where guests, tourists and locals hang out at night or during an afternoon storm. The electricity predictably goes out for a few hours each day, and nothing works with the ruthless efficiency of a London law firm. Which is more than fine with Lynne.

[Your intrepid, and ghostly, correspondent, having coffee at the Zig Zag B&B.]

Besides running the Zig Zag, Lynne coordinates a community crafts collective for local women who are HIV-positive.

“THIS IS THEIR WORK!” she shouted over the noise of the ferocious afternoon rainshower thundering down on the tin roof of the Zig Zag’s restaurant-cum-front office. Lynn gestured to the racks of hand-beaded necklaces and earrings on display; all of the proceeds are returned to the local women.

Shortly after moving to Zambia, Lynn founded a UK-based charity, Life Begins, to care for and educate the children in a nearby village—too many of whom would otherwise be sent to work in the local gravel quarry at ages as young as two years old. She and her colleagues run a day-care center that feeds and cares for 100 children and 65 babies every day. Lynne collects used clothing, toys and books for the children, and on the morning we left, we handed over some t-shirts and my Disney World baseball cap in our feeble attempt to “help.”

*******

And then there’s our friend Barry Berman. A screenwriter whom we first met at a coffee bar in Los Angeles, Barry traveled to South Africa four years ago to visit a friend and kick around the country for three months. Then he met the gorgeous human whirlwind known as Megan Kruger and fell in love. He began a bi-continental relationship with Megan, and an unexpected relationship with South Africa.

With one higher degree from Ringling Brothers’ clown college, a two-decade career in Hollywood, and completely self-taught gifts as a brilliant amateur chef, Barry made the natural next career move: helping start a cooking school in a country he knew almost nothing about.

On the third day of our visit to Cape Town, we drove with Barry down a leafy residential street in the suburb of Pinelands. We passed several young people walking singly or in pairs, dressed in chefs’ whites, heading to the same place we were going: a Masonic lodge that for five days a week in eight-week sessions is home to Infinity Culinary Training, the life-changing establishment that Barry co-founded in 2009.

The three of us arrived at the school after a half-hour drive from the affluent Cape Town neighborhood of Sea Point, where gated, walled, and barbed-wired hillside homes overlook the Atlantic Ocean and Three Anchor Bay. The students, on the other hand, were walking from the train station, having arrived on third-class trains from the impoverished townships outside Cape Town, where many live in tin shacks with dirt floors, outdoor toilets and illegal wiring.

[A bathroom in the township of Phillipi, outside Cape Town. "Not much privacy," noted our guide, Khululani, wryly. Khululani, a former ICT student, is now the school's Executive Chef/Lecturer. "I am living testimony to the school's motto, 'Changing lives through cooking,'" she says.]

Seventeen years after the end of apartheid, poverty and unemployment (25% in the nation as a whole; 50% among South African youth, according to an Al Jazeera report) are what one politician recently called “ticking time bombs” in South Africa. To see this in action, you need only read Barry Bearak’s staggering article on mob violence in a Johannesburg township in last week’s New York Time Sunday Magazine.

Life is cheap and short when you have no hope. Infinity Culinary Training is about giving hope—and, more to the point, getting jobs.

The students—who do not have to pay for their own tuition (none of them could ever afford it)—are required to commit to twelve intensive weeks: eight weeks of classroom study and kitchen training, and a four-week internship. Unexcused absences are cause for dismissal from the school. Their sponsor-donated chefs’ uniforms must somehow be kept clean and white. They must work with ingredients they’ve never heard of before and that look vaguely disgusting to many of them. They learn knife skills right off the bat and within days are chopping vegetables and julienning herbs like professionals.

After eight weeks, each student is placed with a local hotel, restaurant or market for a four-week internship, after which—if they make it through and earn their final certificate from ICT—they can get fulltime jobs. It's likely they’ll start at the bottom and earn low wages (Barry doesn’t mince words about this); but most are thrilled to be working and earning any kind of salary. Many are the first in their families to have jobs in generations.

“Before I came here, all I did all day was eat and sleep and drink and do bad stuff,” said Thobani, as we sat outside on the grass with the students at the end of a school day. “I want to provide an example for my five-year-old daughter.”

[Thobani in the kitchen at ICT.]

Abongile, a 19-year-old with a four-year-old daughter, was dubious when she first heard about this school where students didn’t have to pay tuition. “I thought, ‘This man has come all the way from America just to scam us South Africans,’ ” Abongile said. But she came anyway—why not take advantage of it until the scam was revealed, she reasoned. To her surprise, Barry’s promises turned out to be for real.

“People here make empty promises. All. The. Time.” said Verna, who at 39 was one of the two oldest students in the class. Verna had previously tried to get a loan from a local bank to go back to school, and had appealed to her local district representative for help, but with no luck. I met Verna in the ladies’ room, where she was happily adjusting her new “specs.” A few days into the class session, Barry had noticed that both Verna and Abongile were having difficulty reading the board, and arranged for them to see an eye doctor and get glasses.

“Nobody does what Barry is doing—nobody,” Verna said.

Stan and I spent a day and a half at the school, watching the students study vocabulary words (“concassé,” “slurry,” and “investment” were on one day’s test); chop onions and carrots and sauté meat for the day’s lamb curry; slice potatoes thin on a microplane for a homemade potato chip garnish; and clean, clean, clean.

“Clean as you GO,” Barry’s voice would boom across the kitchen. “A-B-C: Always Be Cleaning.”

“Yes, chef,” they’d answer in unison.

[I joined the students to practice my non-existent flipping skills. There were dried red lentils in this pan when I started. By now, most were at my feet.]

Lunch is a highlight of the school day—except for Linda, who had a hard time eating because she knew her three children at home were hungry.

In the afternoons, Barry offered improvised, heartfelt motivational talks, encouraging the students to let go of the insecurities and voices that told them they weren’t good enough. He praised their hard work and demanded that they resist falling back into their old ways, even as friends back in the township tried to pull them down.

Three weeks after Stan and I got home from Africa, the students we’d met left the school and went on to their internships. Only one fell by the wayside, ditching the restaurant job after a few days because he felt he was too good to do such lowly work. The rest stuck with it, graduating from ICT four weeks later. All of them now have fulltime jobs.

Barry continues to get messages from his former students.

“The doors were opened and I had to enter,” Abongile wrote in a text message. “You were like a father to me and for that I thank you with all my heart.”

Three of the guys got together in the township and called Barry on a cellphone on Easter Sunday. "They said they want to talk to the ANC about helping the school survive," Barry reported in an e-mail, "because 'When everybody in the locations feels what we feel, South Africa will become strong and good and loved.' "

A new class session has begun—as usual, without knowing exactly where the money will come from to see the session through. Barry has learned that one student was raped as a child. One was beaten and robbed on the way to school one day. Another is now homeless. And they keep coming to class. It gives them hope.

And I, bitten, am biding my time until we can get back to Africa.

[Infinity Culinary Training graduation, April 2011. To donate to ICT, please click here.]

The Glass Menagerie

2011-06-03T14:20:00.001-04:00

There are two kinds of people in the world. No, not "the kind who divide people into two kinds of people and the kind who don't." There are the kind who, when walking down the street and feel all eyes upon them, think, "Damn, I look hot today" and the kind who think, "Is my underwear showing?"

I'm in the second camp.

Idiotic insecurities run through me like water flowing downhill, carving familiar channels and sometimes overflowing their banks. Why? Where did they come from? Why are they so persistent in the face of contradictory evidence that I'm an otherwise competent person who rarely wears her underwear on the outside of her clothes?

A friend of mine, now an insanely fit exercise maven, once said that she'll never not think of herself as the chubby child she used to be.

I believe that, locked and sealed inside the control room in my brain, running the lights and the sound board, there's a replica of my seventh-grade self, with bad skin, bushy eyebrows, crooked teeth and the nickname "The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes," given to her—not admiringly—by the boys in her class. She'll just never go away, this girl, and neither will her image of herself as the awkward, undesirable odd girl out.

This isn't a play—I swear—for pity or compliments (which that 13-year-old girl would never believe, anyway). It's just an intriguing notion to me, how our self-image can get so stuck in the wrong groove for so long.

I've been thinking about this since last week, when My Beloved and I traveled to Rhode Island for three days to visit schools and talk about our book, a historical graphic novel for kids. Typically we speak at elementary schools; fourth and fifth grade is pretty much our sweet spot, when the students are studying the American Revolution for the first time.

It's delightful to talk to kids at that age. They—boys and girls equally—are enthusiastic, spontaneous, confident, open, eager to throw their hands in the air to answer a question or ask one. ("Why didn't you include the part where the French came to the aid of the colonists? I think that was extremely important," asked one precocious fourth grader in Providence. "Why do people always start wars?" asked a fifth grader in California.) They request our autographs, even though they've never heard of us before. They laugh at our jokes. What's not to love?

But last week, after two and a half days of talks to the young ones, we wound up our trip with two classes of eighth graders. Now there's an exercise in humility.

"Can anyone tell me what a Tory is?" I asked the assembled teenagers. Silence, hair-twirling, chair-shifting, smirks. I rushed in with the answer to my own question before I'd be tempted to add, "Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?"

One girl spent the entire time with her face turned 180 degrees away from us. Another, asked to help read aloud a short scene from our book, grimaced as if she'd been asked to stick a pencil in her own eye.

One of the boys eyeballed me and My Beloved and asked, "Are you two twins?" Another asked, "Were you forced to commit holy matrimony?"

The kids were restless, noisy, jokey, cocky (the boys), silent (the girls), and would rather have been anywhere else.

And really, I understood. You couldn't pay me enough money to go back to junior high; sorry, "middle school." What a bizarre time—having your body abducted by aliens, feelings you can't articulate, hyperactive self-consciousness, and wanting so badly to be cool enough to fit in while normal enough not to stand out.

I imagined me sitting at that desk with my head turned to the back wall of the classroom (or toward the boy at the next desk). "Please," I'd be thinking, "don't look at me, talk to me or let me know in any way that you know I exist."

But I do know you exist, darlin'. And someday, you will, too. Then do me a favor: Leave this girl and all her wretched insecurities in the eighth-grade classroom where she belongs.

"...an adventure any woman would relish for the rest o' time."

2011-01-02T12:35:00.002-05:00

Dear 2010,

You're not very popular around these parts, what with all the lost jobs, unfound jobs, obscene political jello-wrestling, rampant greed and chicanery, and general displays of the end of civilization as we know it (exhibit one: any cover of OK! magazine). As my friend Michele said on Twitter the other day, "Dear 2010: Do not let the portal pummel your posterior on your way out."

So I feel a little sheepish—like the employee who says of a tyrannical boss, "Gosh, he's always been very nice to me"—when I thank you for the gifts of the past 12 months.

I don't know what little bird was whispering in your ear, but you seem to know my taste exactly. The life in New York is a perfect fit, and I'm already getting tons of use out of it! And I've received heaps of compliments on my new husband—what a great find! Thank you, so much, for everything.

Our arrival in New York City on January 1, 2010 after a spectacular cross-country drive.

The sale of The Child's and my Los Angeles home of 10 years—and the successful arrival of our belongings in New York.

The visits of four of my five siblings, three of my in-laws, and six of my nieces and nephews, and our adventures...
* circumnavigating the island on the factoid-rich Circle Line boat tour (did you know that 4/5 of the immigrants at Ellis Island never set foot on Manhattan, instead heading off by train to other states?).
* discovering (in the presence of three minor-age nieces and nephews) that yes, exhibitionists really do take the rooms at the Standard Hotel that overlook The High Line.
* eating pizza at Grimaldi's after walking the Brooklyn Bridge.
* falling back in time at the Museum of the City of New York.
* eating at Cafe Lalo with the You've Got Mail devotees in my family.
* paying respects to the Museum of Natural History—even if we only got as far as the lobby.

A sunny April morning with arctic temperatures at the tippy-tip of Cape Cod, where My Beloved and I got married.

Squiring The Child away from the disaster college. I asked if there was anything she'd miss about it. "Well, there was a tree that was great for climbing," she said.

Watching the plants grow lush among the boardwalks on the Hudson River as we entered summer.

Thick, humid July days and sultry August nights. Do I dare to eat a peach? I did.

A final September trek to New England to gather The Child's now-mildewed belongings from storage—just before she started her new job in the fiction department at Barnes & Noble.

A 10-day October visit to California, where we celebrated my miraculous mother's 85th birthday.

(My mother and her mother, taken sometime in the late 1940s or early '50s.)

My first chance to vote in a New York election. (But really, did you have to take away the cool voting lever thingies just when I got here?)

The spectacle of a New York City autumn...

...and the quiet ferocity of a New York City blizzard. My first. Not my last.

It's been a great ride. And, hey, thanks for introducing me to 2011! I think we're going to get along.

* Title taken from Katharine Hepburn as Eula Goodnight in Rooster Cogburn.

Suddenly, This Summer

2010-10-08T16:33:00.002-04:00

My Beloved and I went back for a weekend visit to Provincetown, Mass.—or as my friend Jenny calls it, "the scene of the crime." We arrived in rain on Friday, were rewarded with a glorious blue-sky Saturday, and stumbled across two barefoot-on-the beach weddings, one gay, one straight. I love P'town.

On an overcast Sunday morning, we bicycled through the rambling Provincetown cemetery, which differs from other small-town cemeteries in the number of gravestones that read "drowned" or "lost at sea."

I was particularly struck by the plot of Captain Barzillai Higgins and his wife Abigail, and by the five little headstones laid out in front of them. Five of their seven children died before they turned seven. Two of them, little Abigail, age 4, and Isaac, age 1, died within six days of each other in April 1832. Captain Higgins was lost at sea when a steamship collided with his whaling schooner. Son Solomon died at 35 while at sea in Haiti. And Abigail lived to age 75—surviving her husband, one granddaughter, and every damn one of her seven children.

If there's ever a sign from the universe that you need to get over yourself, you'll find it in a 19th-century cemetery.

I did some fretting this summer, but I do realize (after the fact) how first-world and 21st-century my worries were. This was our summer of transitions: our first together in New York, and the first time I've witnessed the bubbling-up of spring into summer and the fitful slide of summer into fall. This summer also marked the end of The Child's first year at college, a year that, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. The qualities that looked good on paper—structurelessness, independence, having no roommates—proved less charming in realities on the ground; a year that started with anticipation, hope and a little stress ended with only the stress remaining.

So The Child is not going back to that college; in fact, she's not going back to college at all this year. After a couple of months in L.A., she decided to join us in New York and look for a job and an apartment. Which meant the three of us living together in a one-room loft apartment where the only wall is in the bathroom. Cozy!

We established house rules, we danced the complex minuet of three adults living in a small open space, we endured some gritted teeth and frayed nerves. But we—and she—rose to the occasion, too. She'd come home from days of pavement-pounding and resume-delivering, and we three would compare notes over dinners at our little table by the window. We'd all turn out our lights at the same time each night.

The Child got a job at Barnes & Noble, and thanks to Craigslist, has found an apartment with an adorable and compatible roommate in Brooklyn. In an emerging, gritty-turning-hipster neighborhood that had me fretting again as I researched crime statistics and haunted local blogs for comforting words on safety.

I consulted a young female acquaintance who has lived there for six years. Brigitte wrote back, "I'm not sure what I can say that would be reassuring except it is home to many people who live, love, and experience joy in this neighborhood." I calmed down. We walked the streets and appreciated the ingenuity and optimism of people opening bakeries and organic markets and coffee houses in former industrial spaces. The Child started schlepping stuff into her new fourth-floor walk-up.

It's only been a few days so far, and maybe I'll never lose my maternal capacity for spooling out worst-case-scenarios while I lie in bed listening to the sounds of the city. But though my child is not under my roof, she's not at sea, nor is she lost.

In fact, I think this may be a chance for both of us to find something.

Without Love

2010-08-31T12:29:00.002-04:00

I started to write a long-overdue blog post about something completely different than this—about the usual: my life. I'll write that post next time, but not right now.

My former colleague at Modern Maturity magazine, Marcia Forsberg, has been missing since February, and her husband of 39 years has just been arrested on suspicion of murder. The police are searching the Lake Piru campground area in Ventura County, California for her body, based on "incriminating statements" her husband, Rick, made to the detectives. They think he killed her in their home in February and rented a car—rented a car!—to transport her body elsewhere. He then stayed in their Orange County home for the next six months—six months!—and told neighbors that she'd gone to Arizona to visit friends.

We've all seen these stories on the news, on CSI, on Without a Trace, on Law & Order, on Bones, on Mystery. I've never seen this kind of story flash on the screen with the face of someone I know. I'm not processing it.

I watched the bleached-blonde reporter end her story by ominously intoning, "And, neighbors say, Richard Forsberg had recently taken up...fishing," and I thought, "This is some kind of bizarre satire."

Marcia—pronounced "Mar-SEE-ya," because she didn't do things in a typical way—was tall, striking, with big curly hair and a constant conspiratorial smile. She was what you'd probably call touchy-feely, a woman who believed that her experience with breast cancer had taught her invaluable lessons, and who found the good and the humor in most situations.

She and Rick had no children, just each other, and from what Marcia always said they loved it that way. I had the impression of mutual, even slightly obsessive, devotion.

Modern Maturity moved from California to Washington, D.C. in 1996, and our work group broke up. A few of us met for occasional lunches and catch-ups, but I hadn't seen Marcia in years. But I can hear her voice, see her leaning over to me (I was 8 inches shorter) to share an observation or a mild piece of gossip and laughing richly.

Even if the police get answers, they'll never get the answers I want. I don't mean to sound naive, but how does this happen? What goes on in a nearly 40-year marriage between high school sweethearts such that it ends not in divorce, but murder? Who is this man, and where did the guy go whom Marcia loved and trusted?

I'm sorry, Marcia.

The Rainmaker

2010-07-19T15:35:00.001-04:00

I like to sleep with the window open
And you keep the window closed
So goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye.
—Paul Simon

I like the windows open. (Fortunately, so does My Beloved.) I like the sounds drifting up from the street, I like the cream-colored curtains billowing with a breeze, I like feeling connected to the world outside. But it's been hot here, really hot, and we've been closing the windows and running the air conditioner all the damn time. I hate that/I love that/I hate that/I love that.

I'm conflicted about my relationship with the air conditioner. But I'm more conflicted about feeling sweaty, sticky, clammy and gross, and about contorting myself into unattractive positions so that no piece of my flesh touches any other piece of my flesh.

Thus, the air conditioner runs several hours a day and we do our communing with nature in the early morning and the late afternoon/evening, when the air feels more like the caress of a silk scarf and less like the lick of a large dog. And we, like Paul Simon, sleep with the window open.

The other morning, I was having one of those especially vivid and surreal dreams that I swear are swirled up when your sleeping body is a little too warm. This one had to do with a cryogenic chamber buried in my parents' backyard. I wasn't sorry when I woke out of it, even if it was 5:30 in the morning. I got up and went to the window, and saw this:

And then this:

I'm not usually a sunrise kind of gal, so this felt like a reward for virtue.

There are other rewards awaiting us out there on the fringes of the day. Like the trail of breadcrumbs I found on my morning river walk today:

There were more than a dozen of them. I hoped to find a chalked "YES!" at the end of the line, but I'm afraid the mystery remains unsolved. She couldn't have said no...could she?

The light this morning was eerie—a dark gray sky foretelling an oncoming rainstorm, with the sun sliding through underneath. It made Jersey City seem downright compelling.

The other evening, after working at our desks in the artificial air all day long, we wandered down to the water again, just in time for the sunset.

The sky and our mood mellowed.

And when we discovered a tango class in progress at the end of the pier, it made perfect sense in a Felliniesque kind of way.

Then we went home and threw open the windows and let the sirens and the whoops of laughter and the clop of horse hooves drift up to us on the breeze.

"Corners—lights—shadows."

2010-07-12T18:41:00.001-04:00

I've been driving the streets of L.A. a lot lately...in my head.

I guess it's fitting that when I think of Los Angeles, the land of the driven, I should remember intersections and gas stations and mini-malls. But there's a poignancy to these particular memories; a minor-key soundtrack seems to be playing on the car stereo. Because sitting in the passenger seat as I drive is a Child. She's a junior in high school, doesn't yet have her license, and every morning I drive her the 10 miles across town to school.

Sometimes she sleeps the whole way. Sometimes she eats the fried potatoes I made for her while she'd showered and dressed. Most mornings we listen to her CD mixes, and I routinely fail the obligatory exam.

"Okay, who's this?"

"Um, All-American Rejects?"

"What?"

"Um, The Flesh Tones?"

"You mean The Hush Sound? No."

"Um, Tegan and Sara?"

(Shake of head. Facepalm.)

But the dopey ones I manage to learn by heart; in fact, I can never get them out of my head. She and I tsk with mutual disdain over the inane lyrics.

" 'There's no distance in between our love' ?" The Child says, her shoulders and voice rising with incredulity.

" 'You're part of my entity/Yeah for infinity' ?" I counter.

Then we sing along with Rihanna together.

" 'You can stand under my um-ber-ella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh.' "

Every time she plays a new song for me, she surreptitiously watches my thumbs to see whether they tap the steering wheel in time to the music—the sure sign of a hit. She finds it weird and slightly disturbing to see them tapping to the beat of Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl." But I think I secretly get some cool-mom cred with her friends when she reports this. (She may beg to differ.)

I'm proud that she feels comfortable enough to preface a new song with "This one is not really parent-appropriate"—and then play it for me anyway. I admit to brief palpitations on the first hearing of The Dresden Dolls' "Shores of California," with its lyrics "All I know is that all around the nation/The girls are crying, the boys are masturbating."

Now I hear "Shores of California" and I'm achingly nostalgic for a certain stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard between Westwood and Beverly Glen, or of Sunset Boulevard between the Strip and La Brea. I miss turning the corner from La Brea onto Hollywood Boulevard and waving at my dad's star on the Walk of Fame.

"Hi, star!" we'd chorus, waving vigorously, perplexing the guy hosing down the sidewalk.

And I miss the sleeping, texting, chewing, singing, ranting, witticizing, facepalming, silently mulling high school junior sitting beside me. The girl who is now a sophomore in college and is spending the summer on the other side of the country.

I'll never get that year back. I'm grateful to have had it. And as anyone knows who's read my many recent posts, I'm truly grateful for the here and now in New York City. Still, in some impossible way, I want to hold that junior year in my hands again. These conflicting true things co-exist in an uneasy mash-up in my head. And I'll just have to live with that.

As the sage said: "You're part of my entity/Yeah for infinity."

* Title taken from Katharine Hepburn's autobiography, Me; on leaving the California house she once shared with Spencer Tracy.

End-of-the-Line Trip #3: 1 Train to South Ferry

2010-07-05T21:40:00.000-04:00

[The third in an ongoing series of trips to the end of every one of New York's subway lines.]

I love that Manhattan is an island. I love that if you walk anywhere long enough in any direction, you'll end up at water. I love that there are all kinds of methods for getting on and off the island—and that my favorite, ferries, can take you to other islands.

Yesterday was the 4th of July and it was 12,000 degrees in New York. (Today it's 12,001.) Naturally that meant one thing to My Beloved and me: We must spend it out of doors for hours on end, surrounded by scads of other people. Otherwise, what's the point?

So we took our neighborhood train, the sweet poky local 1 train, to the South Ferry station at the bottom of the island. There we'd catch the ferry to Governors Island for a free concert by Rosanne Cash, whose latest album, The List (inspired by the list of 100 essential country songs given to her by her father, Johnny Cash) has been in heavy rotation at our house.

We'd never been to Governors Island before, so the lure of the new was part of the attraction of the day. A military installation since the days of the British (when it was used for "the accommodation and benefit of His Majesty's Governors"), the island was closed as a military facility in the 90s, and is now being redeveloped by New York State and New York City. The southern end of the island will be reshaped as a Central Park-like space, with man-made hills and streams, the better for viewing the Statue of Liberty across the harbor. The public can visit the island on weekends via the free 800-yard ferry ride, and bring or rent bikes to ride around the island.

As the doors of the subway train opened at South Ferry, the riders poured out and up the stairs, dividing left and right depending on whether they were aimed at the Staten Island Ferry (right) or the Governors Island ferry (left). We shared our standing space at the front of the ferry with a group of 20something hipsters and a hyper-confident, blonde-ringleted five-year-old who muscled her way to the window to announce the goings-on.

"WE'RE LEAVING!" she bellowed as the ferry creaked away from the dock. "WE'RE MOVING! HEY, WE'RE GETTING THERE! WE'RE HERE!"

While we'd had visions of sitting in the blazing sun for hours, we were surprised to find the island shady and pastoral, with rows of grand old houses that are in the process of being reconceived as artists' galleries and local artisans' shops, among other things. On the 4th of July, it was an ideal place to loll about and picnic.

We planted ourselves in a prime spot near the stage almost two and a half hours before the concert, and spent the time people-watching, reading, eating grape tomatoes and chocolate-covered pretzels, and noticing that the signage managed to spell Cash's name wrong. (No "e" in Rosanne, guys.) The sound check gave us early birds a little bonus concert, as she and husband John Leventhal and the band tested out the blues classic "Motherless Children."

The concert itself included fantastic duets between Cash and Leventhal on "Sea of Heartbreak" (which she performs with Bruce Springsteen on the album) and "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"; a rocking version of "This Land Is Your Land"; and Cash's killer cover of Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe."

And the rousing encore of "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)" gave me the happy chance to trot out my lame white-girl dance.

Then...back across the water to Manhattan...

...just in time for a wonderfully international 4th of July dinner with old and new friends from the U.S., the U.K., South Africa, Italy, India, and Canada. Plus a view straight down 23rd Street of the fireworks over the Hudson River.

I know it wasn't Thanksgiving, but I gave thanks, anyway—for independence, for great friendships and great music, and for a family and a city I love.

End-of-the-Line Trip #2: E Train from Jamaica Center

2010-06-27T15:30:00.000-04:00

I'll admit right off the bat that this one is a bit of a cheat. Yes, we did arrive at the end of the line on the E train, but it was...an accident. It was part of a series of June travels—New York-L.A.-New York; New York-Virginia-New York; New York-Orlando-New York—that have only now ended and involved one unexpected ride on a shuttle bus in Jamaica, Queens when the subway was being serviced. And a careening, cheek-by-jowl journey it was, as squashed travelers and locals swayed and lurched through the lamplit neighborhoods, keeping up a loud patter the whole way—"This is riDICulous, yo"..."Where are we GOING?"..."Just take me to my crib, I'll DRIVE to Manhattan"—until we all tumbled off the bus together at Union Turnpike and poured down the stairs to the subway.

So, my apologies, both for this little ruse and for my long blog absence.

After spending so many months chronicling my impending life changes—a Child going to college, a cross-country move to New York—I discovered that once I actually landed, I got so swept up in just being here that I neglected to settle down and write about it.

And there was the little crisis of confidence, too; the feeling that I was blathering on narcissistically and who could possibly care? (I'm not fishing here, I swear.) But a few gentle nudges from friends made me realize that I was being a wuss, and a lazy one. If you're going to start a blog, then blog, you idiot.

Hence, blog. So where were we?

1. In which she dives into the deep end. Within a week of our official, no-turning-back move to New York, I had joined the Film Forum, the New-York Historical Society and BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music); donated money to Hudson River Park and WNYC (the local NPR station); attended three films, including one double feature (Red Dust with Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Mary Astor, and Bombshell with Jean Harlow, Lee Tracy and Franchot Tone—bliss) and bought tickets for two lectures. Who knew that the multitudes were waiting breathlessly for a chat on "James Madison and the Constitution"?

I felt like a pirate plunging both hands into a great pile of plundered loot: the riches! I wanted to do it all, every day.

2. In which she receives visitors. In the span of a month, we welcomed four of my five siblings, my sister-in-law, one brother-in-law, one niece and one nephew, many of whom gamely camped out with us in our wall-less one-room loft. Besides offering a warm blanket of family togetherness, these visits were a fantastic opportunity to be an annoying show-off. "That white building that looks like crumpled plastic? Oh that's Barry Diller's IAC headquarters, designed by Frank Gehry." "Here we are in Washington Square Park, where they once conducted public hangings and buried impoverished victims of the yellow fever epidemic." I adore being an annoying show-off. These visits also got us to parts of town we'd never been to before: the archives building where you can do genealogical research; the gorgeous new Brooklyn Bridge Park on the East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges; the Museum of Arts and Design; Grimaldi's Pizzeria. You see things in a new way when you show your town to out-of-towners.

3. In which she goes..."home"? In early June, we flew to Los Angeles for 10 days, the first time we'd been back since the move. Having reserved the smallest rental car possible (the clerk tried to persuade us to upgrade to a compact), we ended up with the only car left on the lot: a monstrous white SUV. I mention this because the weirdness of lumbering around in a Sherman tank after 30 years of driving Hondas and Toyotas added to my initial sense of dislocation and discomfiture. I didn't belong here anymore. The next day we downgraded to a Hyundai and things began to feel more normal. We stayed with my parents, gathered with family, visited friends, soaked up the sight of blossoming jacaranda and bougainvillea...

...spoke to a classroom full of fifth-graders, tooled around town, and took a passing glance at our old condo building (pang). I visited with The Child, who is staying with her dad for the summer, and felt the familiar flutter of guilt over selling her childhood home. Then she and I made a red velvet cake for a family birthday party, and all was temporarily right with the world.

4. In which she goes there and back again. A late-night arrival at JFK, one whirl on a subway shuttle bus (see paragraph 1, subsection a), and a 5 a.m. wake-up call later, we took Amtrak down to Washington, D.C. for a research trip into Virginia. (The second in our series of graphic novels is set during the Civil War, and opens on a fictional plantation near Fredericksburg.) We stayed with my cousins, the youngest of whom led us on a walk in the lush woods near their home:

(That's my Beloved, though, not my seven-year-old cousin in the photo.) Civil War history being rather ever-present in Virginia—we were once crisply informed by a white-haired gentlelady in the Richmond Visitor's Bureau that "Theah's just one pawnt of view down heah, and it's the Confederate pawnt of view"—it wasn't difficult to find sites where we could witness 1860s farm life in action. Ask me anything about grain cradles, flails and threshing wheat! On our last day, we toured the Smithsonian's American History museum, where I pronounced Hillary's gown the best-looking of the First Ladies' inauguration dresses (yes, even more than Michelle's one-armed number), but Grace Coolidge's flapper style evening gown the most delightful of all. Why Calvin Coolidge, you sly fox.

5. In which she and The Child go to Hogwarts. In the greatest of all possible boondoggles, I managed to get a magazine assignment that sent The Child and me to write a mother-daughter piece on the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at Universal Orlando. Me: mother-daughter bonding time! getting The Child her first byline! The Child: butterbeer! Pygmy Puffs! possible Luna Lovegood sightings! It was a busy, humid, footsore few days (we threw in Disney World while we were at it), and I came as close as I ever want to to losing my lunch on a roller coaster during the "Forbidden Journey" ride through Hogwarts.
But I got my bonding wish as we drove around listening to The Child's playlist in our air conditioned Ford Focus; and she got to live her longtime fantasy of walking in Harry's footsteps—even if she was joined by ungodly numbers of fellow tourists, many of whom had waited up to six hours just to get into the park, followed by untold hours of waiting for rides, butterbeer, food, and the privilege of spending money in the Potteresque shops. The Child's advice: Go in a year. (Footnote for Potter fans: Sadly, the pygmy puffs were sold out, the Extendable Ears hadn't yet come in, and Luna Lovegood was nowhere to be seen. But the chocolate frogs, complete with holographic trading cards, were plentiful, and the girls of the Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and the boys of Durmstrang Institute made fetching appearances.)

6. In which she enjoys her honeymoon. Humidity, crowds, non-functioning subways, the Gay Pride Parade landing on our doorstep? Bring 'em on! I'm in my honeymoon phase—with my Beloved-Husband and with New York City. They both delight, inspire and intoxicate me. And I don't have to find parking! I'm a lucky girl.

End-of-the-Line Trip #1: 7 Train to Main Street, Flushing

2010-05-03T22:49:00.000-04:00

My Beloved and I were either mad dogs or Englishmen in a previous life, because we never do anything except in a blazing midday sun. A hike in the California desert? A tourist trek across Cochin, India? Hang on, we have to wait till the clock strikes twelve and the temperature goes into triple digits.

And so our debut End-of-the-Line trip (the first of our excursions to the farthest reaches of the New York subway system) took place on the hottest day of the year so far. Admittedly not 100 degrees—but 86 and the first humid day of the season. That immediately put us in a good mood.

Our mission: to ride to the end of the #7 train, said to be one of New York's busiest lines and one of the most ethnically diverse subway lines anywhere. The 7 originates at Times Square in Manhattan and ends at Main Street and Roosevelt Boulevard in Queens—smack in the middle of Flushing's Chinatown.

But the fun of the ride started earlier, as soon as the train emerged from under the East River and came up above ground in Queens. I love riding elevated trains, getting the roof-top view of the surrounding city and the occasional glimpse into people's windows. Three of the stations in Queens, including 46th Street, take advantage of the outdoor light on the elevated platforms with beautifully imaginative stained-glass windows.

We came out of the subway at Flushing-Main Street and into a crush of people on the sidewalks, shops selling discounted Chinese music CDs, and a profusion of Chinese bakeries and noodle shops. As usual when we go anywhere, I had specific foodstuffs on my mind, and if it's Chinatown this must be bao—specifically cha siu bao, roast-pork buns.

After a meander through the indoor Flushing Mall (where the massive True Love Wedding Shop made us happy we'd eloped), we came back out to Main Street and spotted the Taipan Bakery. Although I prefer steamed bao (white and doughy on the outside, sweet barbecued pork on the inside), when you're starved and you're staring at a bakery case exploding with gorgeous sugary products, you don't stand on principle if only a golden-brown baked bao is available. I heroically resisted the cakes and custard buns, picked out my bao, and Stan went for a red bean-paste bun. Then we chewed and sweated our way south through the crowds on Main Street to the Chung Fat Supermarket.

Had we not been looking at a few more hours of touring in the hot sun, I might have been tempted by one of these grumpy fellows...

...or by a bag of frozen dumplings, which filled two entire rows of freezer cases:

Instead we got a box of "Crisp Bits" banana chips and left the shopping mania behind. Another half mile down Main Street and we were in another world: the Queens Botanical Garden. One look at the ferns in the Woodland Garden and I instantly felt 20 degrees cooler.

The Botanical Garden is part of a string of parks that flow through Flushing (sorry) like a gentle green river—while the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway and the dreaded Van Wyck (which leads to JFK, as any Seinfeld fan can tell you) roar by on overpasses.

We walked across the street to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, site of the 1964 World's Fair:

It's changed some since then:

But my favorite thing was the description of the time capsule contents from 1964, which were buried alongside the capsule from 1938–39.

I especially love "one checkered bikini," "tranquilizers," and the misspelling of "cigarettes" for all eternity.

The busy Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is also the site of the U.S. Tennis Association's Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, to which I had to pay homage—though sadly, the players we spied through the chain link fence bore no resemblance to Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal.

Having now achieved our end-of-the-line objective, it was time to head back the other direction. But first we had a few more stops to make.

While in theory it seems a romantic notion to blindly hop a train, go to the last stop, and see what you see, I knew that would likely to lead to some serious disgruntlement as we ended up hot and sweaty down a blind alley in an industrial no-man's-land. So we did some research before the trip, including consulting our friend Rick Meyerowitz, who's been to every corner of every borough and has eaten everything he found there. And lived to draw the tale. (If you didn't see it in The New Yorker, check out the astonishing culinary subway map Rick produced with his partner Maira Kalman, in which they reproduced the New York subway map and replaced every single station with place-appropriate funny food names. All aboard for Montezuma's Revenge!)

So with Rick's suggestions in mind, we walked up and over the walkway that bridges the park and the Stadium-that-should-be-Shea-but-is-now-Citi-Field, and caught the 7 going back toward Manhattan. We got off five stops later, at 82nd Street, and stepped into the life under the el—the way much of New York used to be, until they tore down the 6th Avenue El and the 3rd Avenue El, and the El that once ran right up our street in the Village.

Having left Flushing's Chinatown behind, we were now surrounded by taquerias, clothing stores, divorce attorneys, bars, and music representing seemingly every country in Central and South America. I had visions of grabbing an empanada (an Argentinian bao?), but before we knew it, we'd arrived at 74th Street and the center of Jackson Heights.

Jackson Heights has been on my must-visit list almost as long as I've been coming to New York, and especially since our 2005 trip to India. It's the locus of Indian food and shopping, and I was ecstatic as we patrolled the aisles of Patel Brothers and Subzi Mandi, picking up:
* mustard seeds (99 cents!)
* heat-and-eat packages of palak paneer (spinach and Indian cheese) and navratan korma (vegetables, cheese and cashews in a creamy tomato sauce)
* a bag of "Kerala Mixture" snacks that looked like a packaged version of the bhel puri we saw being prepared on sidewalk stoves in Bombay;
* and a bag of "Mix Mukhwas," the ubiquitous after-dinner breath freshener snack (mostly fennel seeds) offered in bowls at the front of every restaurant we visited in India.

I lusted after a sparkly sari in a shop window:

...and we finished the afternoon with a late lunch at the touristic but excellent Jackson Diner (bhel puri and navratan korma, plus dal, cool yogurt-and-cucumber raita, warm and puffy naan bread) and two bottles of Kingfisher beer. It may be India's version of Budweiser, but it took us back to a rootop restaurant in Bombay on an impossibly humid and buggy evening, and how delicious a cool bottle of piss-water beer could taste.

Then, back up the stairs to the elevated train, an impromptu adios serenade by a full Mariachi band...

...and we were on our way back home, back to the beginning of the line.

Long Day's Journey, redux

2010-05-01T09:11:00.002-04:00

In the Los Angeles house I grew up in, my two older brothers had glued onto their wall a map of the Tube, the London subway system, salvaged from the years we lived in England. I loved to climb up on my brother's bed and stare at those multicolored interlocking lines and read the names of the stops. Elephant & Castle. Tooting Bec. Swiss Cottage. Ealing Broadway. Uxbridge.

I was so little when we left England that I had no memory of riding the Northern Line or the Piccadilly Line or the Bakerloo Line, and I bore a pint-size grudge about that. There was so obviously stuff going on there in those fantastic destinations—Kentish Town! Shepherd's Bush!—and I'd missed it.

Today in the New York house I live in we have a shower curtain bearing a giant map of the New York subway system. The names on this map may not be as Dickensian as those in London, but they grab me: Pelham Bay Park, Far Rockaway, Brighton Beach. They're the crooked fingers luring me to adventure.

The other week, I wrote about my meeting with the charming, enthusiastic Stanford senior who was planning to take New York by storm en route to a successful acting career. The comparison to Katharine Hepburn's wild confidence was easy—as was the contrast with my own youthful caution.

Well, here I am in New York City, a few decades late, but with time to spare. "Maybe New York itself will be your way of taking New York," My Beloved suggested after I wrote that post. You see why I married him—the man is a genius. He was exactly right. I'm not interested in conquering the New York publishing scene, or starring on Broadway or running for office. But I do want to dive into the deep end of the New York experience and muck about. And the shower curtain is going to get me there.

So today we start the first of a series of periodic adventures: We'll pick one subway line and take it all the way to the end, stopping along the way to walk, eat, explore, hit some dead ends, take some pictures, see what we see. Eventually, we'll ride every line in New York City. Today's journey: the 7 train to Flushing Main Street.

Maybe I didn't make it to Ealing Broadway, but I can take on Broadway-Lafayette (B-D-F-V trains)...and Broadway Junction (A-C-J-L-Z trains)...and East Broadway (F train)...and 74th Street-Broadway (7 train)...and Broadway-Nassau (A-C trains)... . And I consider that a more than fair trade.

1964 London tube map: (c) Transport for London, via clarksbury.com. Thank you.

Photo: Church Avenue station, Brooklyn. (c) Me

Adam's Rib

2010-04-26T22:03:00.001-04:00

For years we had this conversation:

"Should we?"

"Nah."

"Okay."

And then one day it was:

"Let's do it."

"Okay, let's do it."

And so we got married.

At least that's the Reader's Digest version of the story. I've been trying to come up with one ever since the day two weeks ago when we stood barefoot on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, just us and the justice of the peace and seagulls for witnesses, and said, "I will."

Reactions from family and friends had a theme: "You're kidding!" "You did WHAT?" "No way!" "You?" And various stories of falling off pieces of furniture when they heard the news.

My friend Lauren said, “I thought it was illegal for heterosexual couples to get married in Provincetown.”

And from my friend Gary: “I like that you call him 'My Beloved.' Now that you're married, will he be demoted to ‘Husband’?”

And everyone's inevitable question: “Had you planned this, or did you decide on the spur of the moment?”

We've been together for almost 10 years, so obviously the subject has come up. We didn't shudder at the idea, but we didn't feel incomplete without it. There were no when-will-you-make-an-honest-woman-of-my-daughter discussions, although seriously, that would have been darn cute.

Occasionally since leaving L.A. and moving to New York full time, my Beloved and I talked about logistics—like how much easier it is to own property together if you're married. But also about finances—like how there could be negative tax implications if we got married. We'd shrug and drop the topic.

Then there we were one Saturday watching The Bourne Ultimatum when I went over and gave my Beloved a hug. He looked at me and said, "Screw the finances. Let's do it," and I said, "Okay, let's do it."

And there you have it. Two lives changed in the span of a commercial break.

Four weeks later, we drove to the Provincetown Town Hall—rather, its temporary headquarters in a trailer up next to the cemetery—and applied for our marriage license. It was a pretty straightforward process; I think they asked for our first and last names. And we skirted the three-day waiting period by driving down to the Barnstable Family and Probate Court to apply for a waiver.

That process involved filling out a “Marriage Without Delay” form, forking over $65, and spending the 10-minute wait watching divorce proceedings in the courtroom. Clever ploy, Massachusetts! But ha ha—we were not deterred! The judge signed our waiver and the jovial Irish bailiff handed it over to us…after extracting a pledge that we weren't Yankees fans.

On the night before the big day, I sat on the bed in our rented Provincetown condo and called The Child at college to let her in on the secret—the only person to know ahead of time. She offered us her good wishes, said she was happy we were doing this, and gave us her blessing: "Finally, you're respectable!"

All that night, I listened to the rain and the wind rattle the windows. I wondered if I was brave enough to get married on the beach in a downpour. And we woke up to the sun blazing in an intensely blue sky. Thank you, universe.

At noon, we stood on the beach in that magic Cape light, looking across the bay at the lighthouse and Pilgrim Monument and MacMillan Wharf, I in my thrift shop dress and Stan in his Old Navy shirt. Before us stood the kind, warm, funny, compassionate justice of the peace, Susan Marcus, whom fate and Google had brought our way.

A wild wind swirled around us, so strong that we could barely hear our own words as Stan and I read aloud the poetry we'd chosen for the occasion—Stan from Walt Whitman:
...Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

...and me from Shakespeare:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds...

We read our vows to each other, comic yet sincere. We picked up fistfuls of sand and symbolically poured them together into one glass container—an olive oil cruet we bought at the Brewster General Store. We shared a glass of red wine, sweet and bitter. Tears streamed from my eyes, whether from emotion or wind.

And then it was done. We were married. He was my "husband." I was his "wife." Such odd words. We played with them like Play-Dough, rolling them around to see what we made of them. We wondered if we felt different. We don't, and we do.

"How's married life?" everyone asks now.

"It's superb," I say. "It's sweet."

And I believe my husband—still My Beloved—feels the same.

Keeper of the Flame

2010-04-04T21:46:00.004-04:00

Shortly after she left Bryn Mawr college, Katharine Hepburn moved to New York City to pursue her acting career. She got a job as understudy for the lead in a play called, appropriately, The Big Pond.

"I learned the part and sat on the sidelines quite convinced that I would be far superior to the leading lady I was watching, Lucile Nikolas," she wrote in her autobiography, Me. "She was a very competent actress who did not have the advantage of being very young and absolutely outrageous and full of a sort of wild confidence based on nothing but energy and ego. Of course I thought I was scared to death, but all I can say now, looking back, is that I was not scared enough. Open a door, I'd go through. Even if the room I was entering was on fire."

This is who I should have been. At least, this is who I thought for years I should have been, back before I stopped second-guessing my 21-year-old self. Before I realized that all my choices—as safe and un-outrageous as they may have been—brought me here, to a place I'm happy to be.

But for many, many years, I berated myself for my Hepburn Deficit Disorder. Why couldn't I have had that energy and ego? Why didn't I assume that I was better, more talented and capable than the next woman—instead of what I did assume, which was that pretty much anyone else on the planet was more deserving than I. Why couldn't I charge through an open door, instead of peering tentatively around the doorframe?

Well, as Hillary Clinton once said, "Coulda, woulda, shoulda—didn't."

I'm over it now. Pretty much. But the other day I met the alternate-universe version of myself, and I have to admit, it gave me a pang.

He doesn't look much like me—he's about two feet taller, almost 30 years younger, African-American and gay. He's a senior at Stanford, my alma mater, and he found me through the alumni association. He wants to move to New York and hoped to get my advice about neighborhoods and jobs and...whatever. Mostly he talked and I listened—with admiration and a rueful shaking of my head.

"New York is the ultimate city!" he said as he perused the diner menu, before telling the waiter he'd please like the "freshly brewed coffee."

"It's so easy to be gay here, it's so easy to be African-American here. This is where it all happens. It's the greatest city in America!" No, he said, he definitely did not want to go home to Los Angeles. "Noooo, no, no. Maybe when I'm older and I'm ready to retire."

He had just auditioned for a summer theater program with Steppenwolf in Chicago, and was casting about for a job he could get in the fall in New York. "I'll do anything—I'll start in the mailroom, I'll get people's coffee. I'll walk dogs. Although I hear that's really competitive."

His plan was to work for a year while studying with his acting coach, go to drama school for three years, and then, ideally, move to London or Paris—where he'd spent his junior year abroad and attended every theatrical production he could grab hold of. "I saw 60 plays last year," he said. "I was broke, but I loved it."

When we met for freshly brewed coffee, he'd been in New York less than a week and had already seen four plays on student-rush tickets. His favorite was Red, the two-man play about artist Mark Rothko, starring Alfred Molina.

"It's about the nature of art, what is art—that whole difficult conversation and dialectic that people have," he said. "I saw it in London and I think it's even improved since then. The staging is so cinematic."

I walked him to his subway, and he thanked me profusely for my time and all the (non-existent) help I'd given him. As I turned and began to walk away, a middle-aged man leaned in to me and said, "Way too pleasant for New York."

I laughed. "Oh no," I said. "He'll do fine."

"You suddenly realize what a tremendous opportunity it is just to be alive. The potential."

2010-03-08T17:29:00.014-05:00

And then—bam!—we lived in New York. And it only took me 40 years to get here.

I keep waiting for the giant wallop of realization, the smack on the rear end as the door to California hits me on my way out. But it's not like that. I've discovered that instead it's an incremental dawning, a gradual accumulation of signs and moments.

I got my New York driver's license, surrendering my California license in the process. I have no car, but I have a driver's license, on which I've given my permission to donate my organs and tissue and eyeballs in the event of my untimely death. (Realizing that my eyeballs would likely go to a New Yorker, the better to see the Empire State Building, was one tiny wallop of realization.)

I got my first piece of direct mail containing return-address labels in my name paired with my New York address—and considered donating money to the cause just because they were the first. Yes, I'm that kind of idiot.

I give directions to inquiring strangers on a regular basis, and have only once sent someone 90 degrees in the wrong direction.

I launch into conversation with total strangers, as I did today on the subway when I found a car full of people dressed in plastic bags. It was the day of the New York City Half-Marathon, explained the woman on my right, who was proud to have completed it in under 10 minutes per mile.

I group my errands not by which side of the street the stores are on or by how many left turns I can avoid, but by the walking route I'll take to get to them. The other day I had a nice straight-line trajectory from the neighborhood office store to the FedEx office to the Jefferson Market library, back to Three Lives bookstore and home. It was a sunny day and I smiled the whole way.

I'm convinced I love snow and slush as much as sun and blue skies. I do not make myself popular when I express this opinion—admittedly formed after only half a winter on the east coast. But where else can you enjoy scenes like this:

And pat yourself on the back for having survived this:

And then you see things like this in a sidewalk planter, which give you a whole new appreciation for spring and new life and starting afresh and hope and change and you feel like the first person who's ever witnessed the birth of a season:

This morning The Child, home on spring break, said in the midst of a lovely 56-degree day, "I wish I could transport my L.A. friends here and say, 'So, what do you think of the weather?' And when they say, 'Brr, it's cold,' I can say, 'Yeah, no, not really.' "

I promise I'll never become a smug East Coaster who glows with moral superiority because her winters are tougher. I'll probably never call myself a New Yorker, because I haven't earned the title. I'm still an L.A. girl at heart—one who goes to the water for relief and renewal, and who feels calmed by the sun setting over the place where a body of water meets the land, whether it's over the Pacific Ocean...

...or over the Hudson River.

But I'm mighty happy to be here.

* Title courtesy Katharine Hepburn, speaking of her film The Corn Is Green, in her autobiography, Me.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

2010-03-03T13:45:00.001-05:00

"Orphaned again!" my dad cried, as My Beloved and I prepared to leave my parents' home for our flight back to New York. My parents have watched a lot of kids (6) and grandkids (13) and great-grandkids (5) come and go from this house, while they stand on the front porch and wave goodbye. They prefer the hellos to the goodbyes.

We'd been staying with my parents for nearly two weeks, ever since escrow closed on my L.A. condo and we'd moved out—watching the moving truck drive away...

...and vacuuming and scrubbing the now-empty space.

I leaned on the third-floor railing and cried for a minute. Stan patted my back. Then we laid out our keys on the kitchen counter, gathered our backpacks and our bottles of 409 and Windex, and closed the door behind us. Goodbye, house.

The two weeks at my parents' house were a gift. Yes, it was a little weird staying in the bedroom I'd grown up in, surrounded by too many pictures of myself in my hideous adolescent state. But the come-full-circle effect was soothing in a way I hadn't expected. I started my L.A. life in this house, and I left my L.A. life in this house. In fact, I literally left my L.A. life in this house, since my mom encouraged us to fill up a drawer with our socks and t-shirts so we'd have them there for our next visit which would be VERY SOON, she suggested.

Stan and I got up early each day and sat in the backyard reading the paper, while the cat put on his Fearless Hunter costume and stalked grasshoppers.

I had the chance to appreciate the stillness and the rustle of leaves and the changing light.

We drove around town in the car we'd sold to my niece and borrowed back from her, now with her bright-yellow graduation tassel swinging from the rear-view mirror. I jammed my camera phone with an L.A. mosaic—from the ridiculous...

...to the sublime.

We scheduled as many goodbye lunches and dinners with friends and family as we could, and I always said the same thing: "We'll be back often. We'll just be traveling from east to west to east, instead of from west to east to west." But I discovered we couldn't stop people from treating this like a mournful farewell.

Between outings, we spent mornings at the breakfast table and evenings at the dinner table with my mom and dad, tucking ourselves in among the routines they've formed over 61 and a half years of marriage. I appreciated all over again my mom's unassuming strength, my dad's quick wit, the old Bob and Ray jokes retold with fresh appreciation, the Sinatra CDs playing in the background, the comfortable potato face of Jim Lehrer each night on the big TV, the sound of my mom's voice reading crossword puzzle clues to my dad, now legally blind with macular degeneration. Like a Waltons family of four, we'd bid each other good night and take up our stations in bedrooms down the creaky hallway.

And then, last Monday morning, it was time to go—time to gather our bags and the giant sheep-cat, and head east toward home.

(To be continued...)

"Has your mind taken hold again, dear Professor?"

2010-02-05T00:27:00.000-05:00

I hope you'll excuse my long absence. I've been having a Jason Bourne moment.

For those of you who haven't enjoyed multiple viewings of The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum like The Child and I have: At the beginning of The Bourne Identity, Matt Damon is found floating in the ocean with gunshots in his back; he has no idea who he is or how he got there, or why people seem to be coming after him with nefarious intent. Turns out he's a highly trained CIA assassin, but he doesn't know that. He just knows that no matter what country he's in or what life-threatening situation presents itself, he can miraculously speak the language and instinctively break a guy's neck in less time than it takes to say, "Who am I? Where am I?"

My Bourne Identity Crisis is less deadly, more domestic. Still, a little unsettling.

I'm back in Los Angeles again, this time to close escrow on my condo, sell everything I own (except my baking dishes and my books; too many books), pack everything in boxes and finish—really, I mean it this time—the move to New York.

At least, my body's back in L.A.; my mind is apparently flying in on the redeye. I get in the car and my body knows how and where to drive, but my brain is going, "Wait, what?"

We arrived at LAX on a weekday morning, and took the #6 Culver City bus up Sepulveda toward home. I watched the city go by out the window. The Citibank (Didn't that used to be called something else? What the heck was it?), the Trader Joe's, Dinah's Family Restaurant. It all felt familiar—my body knew enough to relax, sensing we'd be on this bus for a while—and it was completely strange, too. (The strangeness amplified when the bus stopped outside a mental clinic and a woman about my age got on, her hand clamped over her own mouth. She sat in the front of the bus and rocked a little, emitting stifled screams from behind her hand.)

We walked in to an oddly familiar foreign apartment, everything in a realtor-approved state of fake perfection. What is this place, and why do I know where they keep the extra rolls of toilet paper?

Since then, we've been going through the appropriate motions: selling, packing, boxing. A lone desk chair bobs sadly on an ocean of blank carpet. The desk is gone, though; carted off by another in a new series of Craigslisters. The sound of screeching packing tape travels around the apartment—now it's coming from the walk-in closet! now from the kitchen! A molehill of taped, labeled cardboard boxes grows into a mountain in The Child's former bedroom.

It's weird. What can I say? Qu'est-ce que je peux dire? Wait, what?

And it's exciting, too, of course. I'm developing a new identity. Someone who can fly in from New York, be dropped down in the middle of Los Angeles and instinctively find her way around. And, of course, miraculously speak the language. Sorry I'm late, I was trying to avoid the 405, so I took the 134 to the 101 and got off at Coldwater and came over the canyon, which was fine till I got to Santa Monica, so I thought Olympic would be better, but...

Try that, Jason.

* * * * *

Title courtesy Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn, of course) in The Philadelphia Story, screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on the play by Philip Barry.

Olly, Olly Oxen Free

2010-01-07T14:44:00.001-05:00

One of the great surprises of starting this blog was discovering the world of support and fellowship that existed "out there"—though fellowship is an unfortunate word, since my blog world is primarily populated by women. Articulate, funny, self-deprecating, generous, open-hearted women. From the charming and poetic Miss Whistle, who inspired me to start this blog, to the witty and fashion-savvy (not fashion-slavish) That's Not My Age, whose acquaintance I made just yesterday, these women have included me in a community that expands infinitely outward yet remains as warm as a campfire circle. (I'd also like to thank my muse, Katharine Hepburn, whose name always manages to catch people's eye.)

Yesterday, the Finnish goddess Helena Halme, who tells the romantic story of how she came to marry her Englishman and live in that country for now more than 20 years, "tagged" me in a sort of blog round-robin. When tagged, you're supposed to reveal 10 things about yourself then pass the baton to seven others whose blogs you admire. As Helena suggests, this is a good news/bad news thing: an honor to be listed, a challenge to reveal. Then I decided this blog is nothing if not a great wallowing in self-revelation, so what the hell? Fortunately, Helena and others before her have already played fast and loose with the "10" part of the deal, so I won't be struck dead if I come up short. Here goes.

1. My original life's dream was to be an actress. It was a high school dream, I admit, but passionate and real—until my un-Hepburn insecurities took over and I switched to my default setting: a college English major and a career spent behind a typewriter and a computer screen. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Unless you're doing it out of fear and retreat, rather than by choice. So my midlife efforts at Hepburnization are, in part, an attempt to reconnect with the teenager who never felt happier or bolder than when on stage playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker or Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Adriana in A Comedy of Errors.

2. I'm only now beginning to overcome Imposter Syndrome when walking the streets of New York. For the first nine years I visited New York, I was convinced that every person I passed on the sidewalk was looking at me and saying, "She's obviously not from here." Or worse: "She's obviously from California." I dodged and wove in the face of crowds. I was way too polite. I gave everyone else the right of way. And my clothes! Every season there seemed to be some mutually agreed-upon uniform—ballet flats or tight jeans tucked into boots or mini skirts with black tights—and I was never wearing it. Now for the first time I've either gotten with the program (thank you, Michele Hush, for the advice on buying a down coat), or I've decided I don't give a flying...whatever. Which would make me a true New Yorker.

3. I love water towers on the tops of buildings, trash cans on every corner, and ancient diners with $1 cups of coffee. I must look like a lunatic these days, because I'm smiling all the time as I tread the dirty, dog-poop-smeared, ice-encrusted streets of this city. I'm in my honeymoon phase, where I love everything about it. Subfreezing temperatures? Invigorating! Taxis honking? Musical! That razor-sharp wind off the Hudson? Um, that sucks.

4. I can be a spoiled princess baby. After I made my 47th elevator trip from the sixth floor to the basement while trying to do two loads of laundry with competition from five floors' worth of dirty underwear and dryers that left everything delightfully moist after an hour's worth of creaking and tumbling, I sniped to Stan, "We really have to install a washer-dryer in this apartment." He blinked at me. "I've never had a problem with it," he said. Then he added the magic words, "So I'll do all the laundry."

5. I'm more attached to my car than I admit out loud. My car's name is Dusty. For obvious reasons. She's a blue, only slighted dented 1999 Honda Civic. I resented her just the tiniest bit when I got her, because she has an automatic transmission and I really prefer a stick. But she carried us across the entire country without incident, then took me and The Child safely through a winter weather advisory, including icy interstates and swirling snow flurries, as I drove The Child to her New England college last weekend.

I'm selling my trusty steed on Saturday. And while I'll be happy to be liberated from insurance payments and gas expenses and repair costs, I'll be a little sad, too. Goodbye, Dusty.

6. I get testy with New Yorkers who engage in clichés about Los Angeles. We once had dinner with good friends of my Beloved, on whom I was really hoping to make a good first impression. The wife was chic and elegant. "Do you like living in Los Angeles?" she asked with velvety incredulity. I nearly bit my tongue off. "It's my home," I ended up saying. Lame. Say what you will about L.A.—traffic yes; plastic surgery, yes; sprawl, yes; 'Have a good one,' yes; the weather, yes—it's as rich and astonishing, as spectacular and as vile as anywhere on earth. I like that about a city.

7. I'm still making it up as I go along. Whether it's parenting or relationships or my so-called career, I basically have no idea what the heck I'm doing. I'm hoping that good intentions and sincerity make up the difference.

Okay, kids, that's all I got. At least there's a certain symmetry: 7 revelations, 7 blog recommendations. (Limiting the following list to 7 is much harder than coming up with 7 revelations; I've included blogs that I believe have not already been tagged elsewhere.) And I'd like to state for the record that, according to my made-up rules of the game, you 7 have no obligation whatsoever to play along. I just love what you're doing and wanted to say so in public. Herewith, in alphabetical order:

A Bag of Chips: Yes, she's my niece and no, I don't consider that cheating. She's creative, thoughtful and funny as hell. She's a photographer, scrapbooker, baker, and mom to three gorgeous live-wire children. And she made me a spectacular quilt for Christmas (thank you, Tina!), which you can see when you check out her blog. I especially recommend "Tina and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."

Divinipotent Daily: So smart. So well-spoken. So literate. Every post broadens my intellectual horizons—in a readable, down-to-earth way. Side benefits: good quotes you've never heard before and great poetry. I especially recommend "Goodbye and Good Riddance, 2009."

Miss Whistle: She radiates positive energy, writes with heart and brains, and may be the most naturally generous person I've ever met. She recently lost her beloved father-in-law, and wrote exquisite pieces throughout the experience that conveyed simultaneously the incomparable loss and the enormous pleasure of his well-lived life. I especially recommend "Epiphany."

My Red Boa: I hope that I won't mortify my dear friend Marsha by mentioning her blog, which features beautifully rendered pieces about her childhood and young adulthood—nostalgic with a sly wit. I hope that she has recovered enough from her recent spill to think about sharing more of her stories. I especially recommend "Esmeralda and Me and the DMV."

Simmer Till Done: Luscious food, lustworthy photography, and best of all, writing that combines phenomenal intelligence with sharply honed humor—I ask you: What's not to love? Every post makes me want to cook, and as Jack Nicholson said in As Good As It Gets, "to be a better [hu]man." I especially recommend "You Scrape the Bowl Like a Housewife."

So Lovely: Heartfelt, unpretentious, and truly democratic in her interests, the pseudonymous Charlie Circus offers a cornucopia of topics and musings on her eclectic blog. She gave me a post's worth of Stuff to Think About in the piece I especially recommend, "A Longish One But Bear With Me..."

I Must See the Dhobey: Here's a blogger who almost certainly will not participate in this little tagging game: She's busy blogging from Burma in 1907. In fact, the fascinating posts are actually excerpts from letters written by the blogger's grandmother, whose surgeon husband was superintendent of the jail in Rangoon, Burma.

Laura Lansing Sleeps Here: End of the Road Trip

2010-01-01T20:33:00.000-05:00

We're here. Safe in the New York loft looking at the view through the window while the New Year's Day Twilight Zone marathon plays on TV. All of the boxes and backpacks and bags of snacks have been unloaded from the car, which is parked two blocks away (a Manhattan success story).

We keep saying, "We're home!" and "We're back!" and "We did it!" and "My back hurts!" Yet it's strange, too, to realize that we're finished traveling.

We went from west to east in 7 days, and I feel like I gathered up the entire countryside as we went along and brought it with me, like rolling up a ball of yarn. I have this silent slideshow playing in my head all the time: red New Mexico plateaus, rolling Texas plains, bare-branched Tennessee woods, split-rail fences undulating over snowy Virginia pastures. We may be in the middle of New York now, but I'm still seeing Arkansas farmland and some jet-black grazing cows out of the corner of my eye.

We left Knoxville, Tennessee yesterday morning in a foggy rain—amazingly, the first "weather" we had to deal with on the entire trip.

Somehow, even though we were making this trip in the middle of winter, and despite Midwest and East Coast blizzards in the days before we left Los Angeles (which caused no small amount of fretting on my mother's part), we managed to stay ahead of or behind the snow all the way across the country. Each day as we left our motel, I'd check the weather app on my iPhone, and see that the city we were leaving was due for snow...tomorrow. And we'd scoot out of town in the sunshine.

It rained all the way up and out of Tennessee and into Virginia, which still wore the hand-me-downs of the giant snowstorm that hit just before Christmas.

Yet the highway was perfectly clear.

We drove all day and, as we did every day of the trip, arrived at our destination after dark. Before we left L.A., I'd had idealistic visions of hitting the road every day by 8 a.m., getting in our 7 hours of driving and arriving by mid-afternoon with plenty of daylight left. Ixnay on all counts.

We routinely drove out of the motel parking lot between 9 and 10 in the morning. Those 7 hours of driving turned into 9 when you included stops for gas and food and bathroom breaks and just plain sanity. And we never landed anywhere with even a sliver of sunshine remaining. Fortunately, we had the sense to always book a hotel room the night before, so we were never stumbling around looking for lodgings in the dark (a potential divorce issue even when you're not married).

But yesterday was even better, since we were staying with my cousin and her family in Springfield, Virginia, and we arrived to a warmly lighted house and a kitchen filled with the aromas of my cousin's scallop bisque, fresh bread and coffee cake that had just come out of the oven. I announced that we were moving in permanently. She took it well.

New Year's Eve notwithstanding, we were asleep by 11 p.m.—with a brief wake-up call at midnight when the neighbors set off fireworks.

And at 1:00 this afternoon we were back in the car for the last leg of the journey, carrying fresh supplies: half a homemade vegetable lasagna, peppermint brownies (with two layers of frosting) and chocolate-oatmeal-peanut butter cookies. No, she's MY cousin, and you can't have her.

On this day, finally, we knew we were in the east. For one thing, after six days of spending eight hours driving across a single state, today we were in five states in four hours: Virginia-Maryland-Delaware-New Jersey-New York. For another, after six days of driving for free across more than 2,000 miles, today we got gouged by tolls every 27 minutes. $2, $5, $4, $5, $8.70 and $8. Extortion! Graft! Waste, fraud and abuse! Welcome to New Jersey!

But then the magic happened. We went to light speed as we entered the Holland Tunnel...

...and when we came out the other side, I was reliving the moment nine years ago when I first popped out of that tunnel, riding in the back seat of a taxi after a red-eye flight from L.A. to visit my new beau, who met me in the lobby of his Greenwich Village apartment building looking sleepy and rumpled.

Now here we were, my beau and I, in my little car with California license plates, making our way up that same Hudson Street to that same former factory building in Greenwich Village we'll call home together.

We made it.

* * *

A playlist postscript:

For some reason, I had a hard time thinking of songs about Knoxville, Bristol, Staunton, Front Royal, Silver Spring, Wilmington, Trenton or Metuchen, but my favorite New York bard, Paul Simon, wrote the song that brought us home today:

America (Simon and Garfunkel)
"Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/They've all come to look for America."

Laura Lansing Slept Around: Road Trip, Days 4 and 5

2009-12-29T22:19:00.000-05:00

We woke up this morning in Memphis, had lunch in Nashville, and tonight are sleeping in Knoxville. I love saying that.

I've never been to the south before, so there was a little thrill in crossing the state line from Oklahoma into Arkansas yesterday—even if we drove straight across with almost no stops and without even taking a picture.

My I-love-the-world glow faded some in the cold icy light of an Oklahoma City morning, as we slid out of the motel parking lot after not enough sleep and a heater that noisily pumped hot air into the room all night long. Yesterday's travel became a Point A to Point B mission—Oklahoma City to Memphis—and we accomplished it without a lot of touristic fanfare.

But our spirits lifted as we crossed the Mississippi River toward the lights of Memphis. I'd booked us into a Holiday Inn smack downtown, two blocks from Beale Street, and even though we were too tired and it was too cold to do much adventuring, we were both happy to be there. And when we walked out the front door and I saw this...

...I couldn't help myself. I squealed.

"Ducks!"

"What ducks?" asked Stan.

"Isn't this the place with the ducks?"

"What are you talking about?"

I started to doubt myself. And then I saw the bronze duck webprints in the sidewalk outside the Peabody hotel.

Indeed, it was the home of the famous Peabody ducks, which have swum in the hotel fountain since the 1930s (not the same ducks), and which are marched with red-carpet formality and John Philip Sousa accompaniment from their rooftop home into the elevator and down to the lobby fountain at 11 each morning. At 5 each evening, the ritual repeats in reverse. We'd missed the march, but paid a visit to them on the roof.

Afterwards we walked down to Beale Street, and were sad to discover that the birthplace of the blues is now a Disneyfied theme park—a deserted one in the dead of winter. Horse-drawn Cinderella-style carriages decorated with Christmas lights trolled the streets offering rides. Barkers tried to lure the few shivering tourists into their clubs and restaurants, where bad blues covers blared through the windows. We passed.

Today we drove from western Tennessee to eastern Tennessee, with a midmorning stop at Loretta Lynn's Kitchen in Hurricane Mills. I bought Loretta's blackberry preserves, strawberry jam and moonshine jelly, and trotted out for Stan my favorite Loretta Lynn Fun Fact: She became a grandmother at the age of 29.

At lunchtime, we made our way through downtown Nashville to Hog Heaven, a barbecue place we'd read about in the tour book, which turned out to be a tiny shack with one outdoor counter and no indoor seating. Undeterred, we bought our food (pulled pork for me, with turnip greens and blackeyed peas; greens, peas and barbecued beans for my Beloved) and sat in the car next to a McDonald's to eat it. Will the glamour never end?

"California!" said Drew, the young musician working the counter at Hog Heaven. "What the hey-hey are you doing all the way down here?"

It's a question we've heard in various forms along the way, and I get a charge out of saying, "We're moving from L.A. to New York," which always gets a cluck of admiration.

Of course there are downsides to traveling cross-country on a deadline, and today demonstrated the great big one: We saw nothing of Nashville, one of the great American cities. Not that I regret for a minute doing this drive rather than taking yet another plane trip, but it becomes obvious that this is a note-taking trip, not a sight-seeing one. And that we have to return.

That's okay with me.

* * *

Before I was so rudely interrupted by a non-working Internet connection at the Holiday Inn in Memphis (otherwise a great old hotel—and an excellent mattress), I put together a playlist of songs to commemorate our trip through Day 4, which ended in downtown Memphis.

Starting out
On the Road Again (Willie Nelson)
Every time we take a driving trip we sing this as soon as we get on the highway. This usually consists of: "On the road again, da da da da da da da da da..something something something...and I can't wait to get on the road again." Unfortunately, most of the versions I can find on the internet are of live performances with dubious Willie quality, so I haven't provided a link to the song.

Los Angeles, I'm Yours (The Decemberists)

Route 66 (Bobby Troup)
For obvious reasons. I adored the Depeche Mode version in the 1980s, but it's been replaced by a pesky remix with a too-insistent guitar line, so I'm also providing a link to the Rolling Stones version of the 1960s. And may I just add a personal tribute to Bobby Troup, whom I, as a kid, knew only from the 1970s TV show "Emergency!", in which he starred as an ER doctor and his wife Julie London co-starred as a nurse. And Randolph Mantooth starred as a paramedic. Why do I remember this?

Winslow, Arizona
Take It Easy (The Eagles)
POSTSCRIPT: After all these years, I just learned from my friend Carolyn that Take It Easy was co-written by Jackson Browne, and I would herewith like to give him the appropriate credit. (And credit to Carolyn, as well.) Thank you both!

Albuquerque, New Mexico
Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque (The Partridge Family)
Hey, I didn't say I was creating a list of brilliant music by genius songwriters. I watched "The Partridge Family" faithfully when I was between the ages of 9 and 14, so this is like a free-association exercise for me. You say "Albuquerque," I say, "Point me in the direction of."

Tucumcari, New Mexico
Willin' (Little Feat, as covered by Linda Ronstadt)

Santa Rosa, New Mexico
Santa Rosa (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
A little gift to and from My Beloved, who often drew his comic strip on deadline while listening to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Amarillo, Texas
Cadillac Ranch (Bruce Springsteen)

Okemah, Oklahoma—home of Woody Guthrie
Oklahoma Hills (Woody Guthrie)
As sung by Johnny Cash and Flip Wilson!

Muskogee, Oklahoma
Okie from Muskogee (Merle Haggard)
As sung by Haggard and Willie Nelson. I have to admit I didn't know anything about this time-warp song except the title, and was kind of dazzled to watch an old 1968 video of Haggard singing "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don't take our trips on LSD/We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street...". Wow. But I did enjoy the irony of watching Willie Nelson join Haggard for a duet on this ode to all-American purity. Note that Nelson joins in after the marijuana line...

Clarksville, Arkansas
Last Train to Clarksville (The Monkees)
Okay, I have no idea if this is the Clarksville mentioned in the song. I have no idea if the completely fake Monkees thought of any real-world Clarksville at all. In fact, Clarksville, Arkansas probably doesn't even have trains. But you say "Clarksville," I say...etcetera.

Memphis, Tennessee
I've Been to Memphis (Lyle Lovett)
I love Lyle.

And She Slept Here, Too: Road Trip, Day 3

2009-12-28T23:05:00.000-05:00

The last time we drove across the continent, from east to west in the summer of 2002, I ended up with ooey-gooey feelings of love for the whole country. Maybe all those peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder bread gummed up my brain, but I swear I loved every mile of highway as we threaded our way from New York through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois... Even the places routinely deemed boring by East and West coasters—Iowa, say, or Nebraska; "So flat!" "Nothing but cornfields!"—struck me as exquisite in their own right.

And damn if I didn't find myself falling right back in love again today as we drove through Texas and Oklahoma. And I defy you to round up 10 people who will extol the beauty of the Texas panhandle.

There's just something about how the landscape of one state eases into the topography of the next—the red plateaus of New Mexico flattening into harshly beautiful Texan ranchland—that makes me happy, giving me a touchy-feely sense of the interconnectedness of everything, while appreciating each state's distinct sense of place.

Very distinct.

Where else but Texas, for instance, would a quirky millionaire decide to plant 10 Cadillacs nose-down in the middle of a field just west of Amarillo? Or to let them become a community art project, so that the spray-painted Cadillacs change color and design hourly?

The Cadillac Ranch we went looking for (in fact, we missed it on our first pass and had to double-back from Amarillo to find it). But its little buddy, the 5-car VW ranch down the road in Conway was one we happened on by accident while looking for a restroom.

Maybe it's because the land is so flat there in the panhandle, but the folks in Texas just can't help sticking things in the ground that stand up tall for all to see. Like the "Biggest Cross in the Western Hemisphere," in the town of Groom.

But as we crossed into Oklahoma, I had the sense of the sky coming down to meet the earth. It was a great big swoopy sky, and the cars on the highway with their headlights illuminated looked like tiny shooting stars streaking through the Oklahoma galaxy.

[photo by my Beloved]

Over dinner at the historic Cattlemen's Cafe in Oklahoma City's Stockyard City district (where I had a tiny twinge of guilt over tucking into one of the cousins of the fuzzy-faced moo-cows we'd driven past all afternoon), we talked to our young waiter about life in and out of Oklahoma. He's a native, but has lived in Los Angeles twice and hopes to get back there again "so I can play golf all day." He's also been to New York, and loved it. He'd happily go back there, too.

"We're here in Oklahoma," he said. "You want to go one place or the other."

As I looked at him, I thought of friends in L.A. and New York who would have swiftly agreed with him. But I found myself wanting to raise a little defense for his home state. And I thought, how odd is that?

My Beloved says of driving across the country, "You can drive east, into the country's past, or you can drive west, into the country's future."

To me, it's all a present.

And Laura Lansing Slept HERE: Road Trip, Day 2

2009-12-28T09:49:00.000-05:00

When I realized that our route across the country was going to take us straight through Winslow, Arizona, I immediately made plans to have my picture taken standing on a corner. Yes, I am just that cheesy.

For anyone who isn't familiar with the phrase "standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona," I'll explain that The Eagles' song "Take It Easy" played approximately every five minutes on the radio during my high school years, and every 15 minutes in the 20 years after that. Its opening lines —"Well I was standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona/Such a fine sight to see/It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford/Slowin' down to take a look at me"—spring as easily to my mind as the national anthem. Er, more easily.

So after waking up in Flagstaff, Arizona to brilliantly sunny skies and tiny ice crystals covering the roof and trunk of my car....

...and after a mobile breakfast of Grape-Nuts poured into yogurt containers, and after listening to radio advertisements for the Meteor Crater ("Feel the impact!"), we arrived in Winslow, where I discovered I was not the first person to think of having my picture taken standin' on a corner. In fact, standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona is practically the town's biggest industry.

We stood on the northwest corner in Standin' on the Corner Park, next to a mural of a girl in a flatbed Ford and a bronze statue of...Glenn Frey?

We stood on the southwest corner, outside a gift shop that played The Eagles in constant rotation on outdoor speakers.

We watched a Japanese couple stand on the southeast corner taking pictures of the southwest corner. And we stood on the northeast corner, outside another gift shop where the owner cheerily told us to "Take it easy" as we left with "Standin' on the corner" refrigerator magnet in hand. As we headed back onto the road, a couple from Iowa arrived in a white SUV with "Take It Easy" blaring out of their car windows.

Mission more than accomplished!

The next several hours were a spectacular tour through the Southwest and Tony Hillerman country—red plateau cliffs glowing under blue skies. I kept trying to capture the landscape, but the drama refused to be corralled into an iPhone lens. This was about the best I could do:

We had lunch at the counter at Earl's Restaurant in Gallup, New Mexico, where the deliciously spicy posole brought a fine sweat to my forehead and I dipped Navajo fry bread in honey.

We passed through Albuquerque without stopping, but of course were lured into the "world-famous" Travel Center at Cline's Corners, picking up prickly pear marmalade and red chili-shaped salt and pepper shakers. (Come on, could you resist?) The sky was dark when we came out, and we spent the next hour and a half driving through the pitch black, while I exchanged text messages with The Child, who was on her own California road trip with her dad.

Me: BTW, favorite highway signage of the day: "Gusty winds may exist."

She: Truly an extraordinary revelation, and one that definitely required signage.

At 7 p.m., we turned off the highway in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and onto historic Route 66, where Elvis welcome us to the Motel Safari.

With a good mattress on our king-size bed and excellent reception on the flat-screen TV (this is the Route 66 of 2009, after all), we could finally, really take it easy.

Laura Lansing Slept Here: Road Trip, Day 1

2009-12-27T01:12:00.000-05:00

This was a big day. I sold my house. My daughter left her childhood home and probably won't ever see it again. I cried. Then, like Holly Hunter in "Broadcast News," I looked at my watch, wiped my face with a Kleenex and said, "Okay, we gotta go." And my Beloved and I got in the car and headed east.

Of course it's not entirely that simple. Escrow is just beginning and who knows what can happen. We fly back to L.A. at the end of January and still have to deal with clearing and moving out of the condo. But I've changed my address with the post office and on my magazine subscriptions. And as many belongings as could fit in my Honda Civic are making the trek east with us. So it's the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Or something.

I'm writing now from a motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona, where it's—wait, let me check the weather app on my phone yet again—yup, 4 degrees. Officially the coldest I've ever been. Tomorrow: Tucumcari, New Mexico. We're taking Route 40, the interstate that replaced Route 66—not that anyone could forget Route 66 for a split second.

I love being on the road. Desert or ocean, cornfields or Rocky Mountains, flatlands or vertiginous mountain curlicues, I love watching the landscape roll by through my smudgy car windows. I love car food: trail mix and Cokes and peanut-butter sandwiches and gas station coffee. I love maps, and we have billions of them.

We've been planning this trip for weeks, me obsessively plotting routes and counting hours to see how many miles we can accomplish per day without destroying my Beloved's back. We have eight days to make it to New York in time to meet The Child, who will fly there on January 2. So far, one day down and still on schedule.

We hit the road a bit late this morning, got snarled in Vegas-bound traffic on I-15 in San Bernardino, then finally got clear sailing through the Mojave Desert.

We listened to the driving mix The Child had made for us, a travel-themed edition featuring The Decemberists' "Los Angeles I'm Yours" (How I abhor this place/Its sweet and bitter taste/Has left me wretched, retching on all fours/Los Angeles, I'm yours), Brandi Carlile's "Dying Day" (Chasing miles through the night time/Making tracks with no time for looking back) and the Dixie Chicks' "The Long Way Around" (I hit the highway/In a pink RV with stars on the ceiling).

I was excited to hit Needles, California, home of Snoopy's brother Spike, before crossing into Arizona and into a classic western-sky sunset.

It was pitch-black by the time we rolled into Flagstaff—465 miles, a time-zone change, and a world away from where we started. And tomorrow, as Willie Nelson would say, we're on the road again.

A Delicate Balance

2009-12-22T11:55:00.000-05:00

Hello? Is this thing on? HELLO? Oh, what the hell.

Kate Hepburn here. Susan's been trying to scratch out something or other on this bloggy thing, but she hasn't been having much luck with it and I'll tell you why: The girl's gone crackers.

Yes, I know she looks all right. Not as thoroughly bathed as I'd recommend, but not drooling or twitching. But I'm telling you, she's scattered. Wiggy. Loony.

You don't believe me?

Remember the rains that hit Los Angeles like a freight train the other week? Well, some of us—some of us raised on the eastern seaboard with a little sense in our heads—look at a rainstorm and think: "Close the windows! Get out the rubber boots!" Susan sees rain and thinks, "Free carwash!"

Oh, that's not the loony part—the car was disgusting. So she drives the beast out of the garage, parks it on the street...and the sun comes out from behind a cloud and stays out for the next four days. From Monday till Thursday. Which is when she looks at her watch at 10:20 a.m. and realizes it's street-sweeping day. From 10:00 to 1:00.

Out she goes, flying down three flights of stairs like a lunatic, panting up to the parking officer who is just that minute writing a ticket.

"I'M. MOVING. THAT. CAR!" she says, flailing an arm in the direction of a formerly blue Honda now thoroughly camouflaged under layers of grime.

"Citation's already in progress, ma'am," says the implacable officer of the law.

Result: An unwashed car and a $60 parking ticket on her own street. A street on which she has her own free parking space, in a garage. And that's not even the nuttiest part: This is the third time she's done this.

Then there's the curious incident of the dryer repair man in the daytime. Some of you know a bit of this story—the Russian repair man who, without touching, opening, or testing the non-heating dryer, tells Susan that she must "re-pless de gess heating coil" for a mere "two hondred seexty-seffen dohllars." At which point she thanks him and points him toward the door.

A moment of clarity. Until she calls Sears and agrees to pay $200, sight unseen, for a dryer repair and a one-year warranty on a dryer she's going to own for another month. The Sears repair man arrives on Friday morning, turns the gas valve 45 degrees to the "On" position, and leaves, problem solved.

Beat, beat, beat goes her head against the toasty-warm dryer. Come Saturday morning, Susan and that nice-looking man she calls her Beloved join their friends for coffee therapy. First stop, Trader Joe's—the coffee bar offers a 20 percent discount with a Trader Joe's receipt. Susan buys a little something. Walks out of Trader Joe's. Puts her change in her wallet. Crumples the receipt in her fist and throws it in the nearest garbage can.

Oh ho, stay with me! Half an hour into their coffee date—Susan having paid full price for her drink—she gets up to refill her cup for 65 cents...and while chatting with her friends, throws her coffee cup in the trash.

You see what I mean. Loopy.

Some would say it's sad in someone so young. I say: Baloney! She's plenty old enough to know better. She's 48, for pity's sake. When I was 48, I toured Australia for six months starring in Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice. All those cities, all those parts, all those lines of dialogue! But I didn't go gooney-bird over it.

Susan chalks it up to the stress of selling her house and moving cross-country. Insists she's fine most of the time. Says this odd behavior just oozes out between the cracks.

Oh yes, packing, cleaning, strangers poking into your closets—I know, I know. Such a torment, so painful! YAWN.

Listen to me: Be more of a pig.

I spent most of my life as an absolute pig, concerned only with me, me and me. Not worrying one whit about other people's feelings, what anyone thought, what other people needed. Granted, I was Katharine Hepburn and I could get away with it. I can't speak for you.

But I'll tell you, a few piggy qualities come in handy. Pigs don't worry about new carpeting. They don't fret about real estate prices. And they don't get wiggy. They just put their snouts down, snuffle up their food, and move on.

Oh, you don't have to be a complete pig. Even I learned to soften up when I met Spencer. But for heaven's sake, toughen your skin! Grow a few piggy whiskers! That'll put some healthy distance between you and all that nutty stuff out there.

Because that's where the nutty stuff belongs, my dear. Out there.

As You Like It

2009-12-09T00:23:00.000-05:00

I've been a little blueish, perched here in my fake museum house with its odorific new carpet, stark walls and echoing rooms devoid of furniture.

My Beloved is still in New York, The Child still at school, so I'm bumping around here by myself for the time being. Just me and the carpet guy, back by popular demand; Sam the handyman; and the Russian dryer-repair man. (He: "Det vill be two hondred seexty seffen dohllars." Me: "No senk you, I coot be buying nyew one for det much.")

We were in New York for Thanksgiving, the first time since my junior year abroad that I wasn't at my parents' house surrounded by the clamorous Champlin clan. We're usually 30ish at dinner, scattered among several tables, every chair in the house and the piano bench pressed into service, sisters manning the mashed potatoes and the salad and the gluten-free pumpkin pie, brother wielding the ancient carving knife and fork, the under-12 set in the back bedroom draped over the king-size bed watching Nickelodeon before dinner.

In New York we were three in the apartment, once The Child and I found each other through the throng of the Port Authority bus terminal after her six-hour ride down from college. She and I spent Wednesday afternoon in the kitchen, listening to her "Music to Bake By" mix as we made two pies, pumpkin and lemon meringue...

...and a batch of cookies that emerged from a deliciously disastrous pie crust dough. I called them Mortification Cookies.

At dinner on Thanksgiving we were eight around the table in my Beloved's younger son's apartment, where Peter and his beautiful Portuguese bride, Mariana, cooked the first turkey of their lives—perfectly. Every one of the six chairs in their jewel box of an East Village apartment was pressed into service, along with a trunk topped with cushions.

We devoured everything...

...except half the turkey.

Then we sat with tiny cups of perfect espresso and talked for a few more hours.

Late that evening, I called home to L.A., where I got passed around the living room inside the telephone receiver—"Have you talked to Susan yet? Here, talk to Susan." I missed them, and they missed us, but it was okay, too. My family is like a down comforter, and I felt the poofy warmth even across the country. Plus now I have family in New York, too.

The next day, the three of us took the subway to Times Square for a matinee of Finian's Rainbow—my Beloved's favorite musical—on Broadway. I spent the whole first hour and a half waiting for my favorite lyric: "For Sharon I'm carin'/But Susan I'm choosin'."

Afterwards, we walked through the holiday gift booths in Bryant Park and watched the skaters as the lights in the Empire State Building came on.

It was a very New York holiday, festive and busy. So the re-entry to L.A. was a little rough.

My voice—when I had occasion to use it—seemed literally to echo off the blank walls of the apartment. The blank kitchen window, missing the grotty mini-blinds that we'd thrown away without yet replacing, stared balefully at me in the evenings. I'd reach for the television remote to have a little friendly noise, only to remember we'd already gotten rid of the TV in the living room.

But this is temporary. I've met with the realtors, I've ordered the rental furniture, I'm tidying things up. The place will be on the market probably by the end of next week. Then we'll ring down the curtain on Act I.

For L.A. I'm carin', but it's New York I'm choosin'.

A Bill of Divorcement

2009-11-23T21:09:00.000-05:00

10 Things I've Learned Without Meaning To:

1. It won't always be like this. This has become my mantra in times of trial—I recite it robotically to myself even when I can't really believe that anything will ever get better. But no matter what, it's always true. As of today, the carnival of woes I described last time is over. The painting is finished, the plumbing repaired, the kitchen floor installed, the carpet laid. (Okay, so the walk-in closet somehow didn't make it onto the carpet guy's diagram and will consequently be done in a different color. I so don't care.) We lived; we laughed; we moved on. My friend So Lovely had a wonderful blog post recently on the origins of the phrase "This too shall pass." Like most people, I had always assumed this phrase referred to bad times—and of course it does. But guess what? Not only.

2. It won't always be like this (reprise). Those airy highs, the giddy squeals, the heartthrob moments—they too shall pass. Get over yourself.

3. If you post it in the "Free" section of Craigslist, they will come. I used to have lots of furniture. I don't anymore. I sold a few pieces, but most of it I gave away. Some went to Goodwill, some went to other worthy charitable organizations. None of it went to the sneery man from the Salvation Army. ("Pfft," he said, waving an arm over The Child's trundle bed in perfect condition. "This is heavy. And I have to think about me.") But Craigslist's Free section? A fantastic human drama playing out for an audience of one. People actually audition for you when you offer something for free. "This would be perfect for my little boy to put his crayons in!" "I grew up with those books, and I want to read them to my three girls." "We've been looking for one of these for a long time!" And they don't try to bargain you down from $40 to $20 because, you know, it's free. Time elapsed from the time I posted The Child's trundle bed on Craigslist to the time it left my house? 45 minutes.

4. Maximizing your pain is also minimizing your pain. Not everyone chooses to refurbish their house, sell their house, move across the country and edit a 650-page cookbook at the same time. Not everyone is a masochist. But there are definite advantages to boxing things up once and getting them out of your house once. I can't say the same for the cookbook.

5. Certain things stink. I have a cough I didn't used to have. I chalk it up to the new paint and the new carpet and the newly reglazed, cartoonishly white kitchen sink and resurfaced shower pan. They look beautiful, but they smell. Get out of the house.

6. Certain things should never be said out loud. "Maybe no one will take this middle seat between the aisle and the window." "Wow, traffic is moving really nicely." "I think we've had as many plumbing problems as one household can be expected to have."

7. It's all relative. We had no kitchen sink and no dishwasher (poor us!) for a week. Our friend Pam had no discernible hot water in her apartment through the entire summer and into the fall, and didn't complain to her landlord because her landlord's husband was unwell. When the truth finally came out, the landlord was not grateful for Pam's thoughtfulness; instead, she trudged up the rickety stairs to Pam's apartment and complained about having to put in a new hot water heater. "I'm the tenant," Pam explained. "You're the landlord. It's your responsibility." Did I mention she had no bathroom for several days after her floor fell on her downstairs neighbor's head? I no longer have any complaints.

8. Happy Hours are the answer to everything. Most things. Okay, some things. Nothing in the fridge? A new sink you can't touch? Fumes you can't breathe? Bring on the $3 beers and free hot dogs!

9. Your home leaves you before you leave home. Our place looks kind of astonishingly great. It's clean, it's light, it's spacious. It's no showplace, but it's kind of a nicely Zen blank canvas. I think even Miss Hepburn would approve of its New England austerity. I thought I'd be kicking myself around the block for having waited so long to do these things. Instead, I realized something: It's not my house anymore. I'm just caretaking it for the next owner. And that's okay. This domestic Master Cleanse has helped me divorce myself from my home.

10. This too shall come. We're in New York now, preparing for a brand-new kind of Thanksgiving. The Child will arrive from college tomorrow. We're putting together the new bookshelves. The new futon chair was delivered today. It's a little bit of chaos, but that's okay. If it's chaos, it must be home.

The Madwoman of Chaillot

2009-11-14T00:03:00.000-05:00

So far I've only cried twice. Okay, I also choked up a little when my washing machine hose sprang a leak, but I hadn't had any coffee yet and it all just seemed like a little too much.

Once upon a time—say, a week plus one day ago—I had things down to a science: painting would be finished by Monday, kitchen floor installed Tuesday, new carpet a week later, furniture arranged in pleasing configurations, meet with the realtors and get out of Dodge for Thanksgiving.

No.

The carnival began last week, when my sainted brother-in-law and nephew arrived from Marin County to paint the place. Bob is a singing Irishman—he sings when he wakes up, he sings when he drives off at 7 in the morning to a painting job, he sings through the day, he sings before dinner, he sings as he goes to bed.

But the song died in his throat and his smile froze in place as he took in the water-stained vaulted cottage-cheese ceilings, the still-overcrowded bookshelves, and the godawful decorative remnants left from the previous owners: fringe glued on to every single shelf edge; metallic gold wrapping paper encircling every closet rod; warped plastic shelf liners. Incredibly, these things had seemed sort of amusingly kitsch to me when I moved in, so I left them alone and forgot about them. Ten years later, it was like waking up in the middle of a nightmare.

As Bob and Terry started prepping the rooms, I ran around documenting the traces that were about to disappear under a new layer of Swiss Coffee-colored paint. The measurements on the doorframe...

...the wall in The Child's room.

I created arrangements of The Child's things and e-mailed the pictures to her at college, asking, "Keep or toss?"

(Keep.)

My beloved and I worked maniacally to box things up, schlepping stuff from room to room to try and stay ahead of the painting wave. The cat was not pleased by this turn of events.

Meanwhile, I fielded dozens of Craigslist e-mails from people coveting my solid pine desk hutch, my sweet antique-ish dresser, my papa-san chair. A trail of young people who'd just moved to L.A. from Virginia and Texas and Long Island trooped in and out of the clutter, bearing off my possessions.

In the midst of the chaos, my three angelic sisters brought over a generous picnic lunch that we ate all together on the sundeck, along with Lucy the pug, who enjoyed her munches in the shade of a Monet umbrella:

When everyone left that day, it was time for my first meltdown. Amid the paint cans, the ladders, the draped furniture and the constantly migrating cat-food bowl, my beloved—who four months ago had neck surgery and has been trying to go easy on his back—expressed his anger.

He'd been trying to tell me for months that we weren't doing enough to prepare for this moment, and found himself beyond frustrated by the chaotic condition of things in the house. Plus his arm was aching from all the lifting and from a sudden wrench while removing a heavy wooden CD rack from the wall. And the worst thing: He felt his opinion didn't matter to me at all.

I reacted with typical Hepburnesque flair: I sobbed snottily, lurching from room to room in search of the Kleenex box that I'd packed in the back closet.

He was right, and I felt horrible. I'd been trying to continue living a normal life, taking a box to the Goodwill here and there as a token gesture of packing up, while dismissing his warnings as overly dour and pessimistic. I wanted to show him I was true to my word—that we'd be out of L.A. by the end of the year—but I wasn't working with him as a partner in the moving process. It was a ridiculous, self-defeating exercise, and it crashed on me that night.

Somehow we talked it out, I relinquished some control, we got rid of more stuff, the painting was nearly finished, and we began to see the outlines of a pared-down, organized new home. The fog started to lift.

Then my downstairs neighbor showed up at our front door on Saturday morning and announced that water was dripping on his head from his kitchen ceiling.

The next few days were like a Keystone Kops movie—by way of Fellini.

Monday: 8 plumbers, 3 painters, 10 hours in a single kitchen. Dishwasher removed. Holes gouged in walls. Leak determined to be coming from the drain line.

Tuesday: 2 different plumbers, 5 hours. Drain line replaced. Dripping continues. Leak determined to be coming from the risers. Risers to be replaced tomorrow. Dishwasher sits in middle of dining room. Wash dishes in bathroom sink. Watch pool of water spread across bathroom floor, from newly sprung leak in drain pipe under bathroom sink. Susan has quiet weep over realization that there's no such thing as home anymore.

Wednesday a.m.: Put load of laundry in washing machine. Turn on washing machine. Water spews from water valve.

Wednesday p.m.: Lone plumber arrives with single screwdriver. Announces he's there to remove wood siding then go away. Susan turns into screaming banshee (Susan is never a screaming banshee). No risers replaced. No use of kitchen sink.

Wednesday p.m. postscript: Plumber with screwdriver fixes leaks in bathroom sink and in washing machine faucet. Susan regrets neurotic screaming banshee behavior.

Thursday: 2 plumbers, 13 1/2 hours. Shiny new copper risers in place. Delivering clear, rust-free water to kitchen faucet for first time in 10 years.

Friday: Dishwasher sits in middle of dining room. The carnival continues.

The Iron Petticoat

2009-11-03T20:00:00.000-05:00

Me: Miss Hepburn, I had the strangest dream. I—

KH: Oh good lord, not a dream story. Don't you know that dreams are never as interesting to the listener as they are to the dreamer?

Me: Actually, yes, I know that, but—

KH: Well, if you're determined to tell it.

Me: I dreamed that I was chaperoning Bill Clinton to his surprise birthday party. Madeline Albright was there, of course, and Tippi Hedren. And I was trying to keep track of who was ordering the steak and who was ordering the lamb by poking holes in a dinner roll with the tines of a fork. Needless to say, this wasn't very—

KH: What on God's green earth are you talking about?

Me: Yes, exactly, it was very confusing. And sort of upsetting.

KH: You must be easily upset.

Me: People were waiting...I couldn't keep track of anything...Bill was getting annoyed...

KH: And what do you think this means?

Me: Well, it may have to do with the couch.

KH: Of course it does.

Me: The 900-pound couch is finally gone. There are huge divets in the carpet where it used to be. After getting rejected by the Salvation Army—

KH: You do have a gift.

Me: —I put it on Craigslist under "Free" and a nice guy and his big, strong teenage son came and took it away.

KH: Excellent. The couch needed to go. So what does this have to do with Bill Clinton?

Me: Well, nothing, obviously. But we're in a state of chaos here.

KH: Oh, you don't know the meaning of chaos. Have you seen me play a Chinese peasant in Dragon Seed?

Me: Okay, "chaos" is a little strong. "Disarray."

KH: You're selling your home and moving across the country. Did you expect to remain arrayed?

Me: I donated my wedding china to the UCLA Thrift Store, and the framed James and the Giant Peach poster from The Child's room. We're shredding years' worth of ancient bank statements. We have carpet samples on the floor and boxes everywhere. Some even have things in them.

KH: And?

Me: Well, that's it, I guess. I just feel so...scattered. So out of order.

KH: It's the disorder before the order, that's all. Think of the disorder I put poor Cary Grant through in Bringing Up Baby. And that ended happily, didn't it?

Me: It did.

KH: And you do realize you're not the first person ever to do this?

Me: Yes, of course I do. It's just odd, watching your life history evaporate in front of your eyes.

KH: Oh, let's avoid the melodrama, shall we? Joan Crawford you are not.

Me: Sorry.

KH: Now just roll up your sleeves and dive right in. Do the work.

Me: I am.

KH: No, you're not. You're sitting here talking to me. Go to it! Work clockwise! Don't touch anything twice! Take pictures of things to remember them by if you must, then throw them out! Take charge!

Me: Yes, ma'am!

KH: Just don't ask me to help.

"I would I were at home."

2009-10-24T01:46:00.000-04:00

I've been trying for several days to write a piece about feeling discombobulated, but I haven't been able to get myself combobulated enough to write it.

I feel like a sparrow hopping between twigs, with no perch to land on.

Last Thursday, I drove from New York to The Child's college for Family & Friends weekend. It rained on me most of the way up—when it wasn't snowing. Little did the college know that I had almost no intention of attending the myriad events scheduled (the better to extract donations for a shrinking endowment, my dear), and that I was using the weekend as an excuse to soak up time with my daughter.

Because I waited too long to make reservations, the only hotel room I could get was a half-hour drive from the school. Then I found out about a wonderful program called "Beds for Books," in which local residents rent out rooms in their homes during special college weekends and donate all the money to the local library. I signed up, and was matched with a couple who lived across the street from the college. Genius! And in a wild stroke of coincidence, the husband turned out to be one of The Child's professors. Awkward!

Actually they were lovely, although for obvious reasons, neither I nor The Child was comfortable with the idea of lolling about their house for relaxed visits. And because she refused to let me see the inside of her dorm cell, that meant we spent three days looking for things to do in 35-degree weather, rather than just hanging out and being. We did a lot of driving and meal-eating. In an odd way, being together like this made me miss her more.

Of course, it was still October in New England, and I went snap-happy as I...

...drove onto the campus:

...crunched through the woods:

...admired the leaves in a tiny creek:

...scoured the empty shelves at the local market for their insanely popular cider doughnuts, only to be offered one that had just come out of the oven:

...waited in the car in the rain for my oversleeping child to join me for our final brunch:

...handed her the camera as we drove past the house selling pumpkins from their front yard:

...and watched her return to her dorm before I turned the car around and headed back to New York:

It felt like a long drive back—though a quick visit to my favorite McDonald's ladies' room in Southington, Connecticut, with its inexplicable choices in wall art, cheered me up for a minute:

As soon as I got back to New York, it was time to move out of the loft: The guys were coming first thing Monday morning to refinish the floors. We spent Monday trooping through the streets of the Village, catching a movie, and then spending a restless night in a friend's apartment, where the radiator clanged so loudly I'd swear someone was hitting it with a baseball bat.

Tuesday I flew home. Where is that, exactly? Oh right, Los Angeles. The condo where we've just begun the process of getting rid of everything we've stored up for 10 years. Where my daughter's room is stripped bare. Where the carpet is...beyond description. The place where I now feel more like a visitor than I do in New York.

Today I met with the realtors who will help me sell the condo. I'll get it painted, get new kitchen flooring, replace the carpet. Get rid of my lousy furniture and rent a decent-looking dining room table and chairs. And we'll live in a pretend house for a while until we finally pack up our jammies and my favorite stemless wineglasses and The Child's funky antique dresser and head east.

We'll leave "home" to go home.

* * * * *

Title courtesy Rosalind in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, in which Miss Hepburn starred in 1950.

Woman of the Year

2009-10-13T23:31:00.000-04:00

The other night we had a mini dinner party with a dear friend and my beloved's Number 2 son and daughter-in-law. I cooked a casual supper, we drank beer and wine, we ate cupcakes for dessert, and had a generally delightful and sociable time. And I realized I was channeling my mother while we were doing it.

When I was little, I'd eavesdrop from down the hall as my mom and dad hosted dinner parties in our living and dining rooms. I'd hear the sounds of matches being struck as cigarettes were lit, and of ice cubes clinking in glasses, and loud peals of laughter as my dad told funny Hollywood stories in his skillful raconteur style.

All the time, my mom would be working away in the kitchen putting final touches on the dinner (I remember the Chicken Veronique, with green grapes tucked among the chicken breasts), chatting with female guests who'd slip in to see how she was doing or to offer help (I'd guess Mom rarely took it), and generally making the whole event look smooth and effortless.

She ran the whole house that way.

In no way was it effortless raising six children—four of them born so close together that she had four children under the age of 5 in the 1950s and four teenagers in the 1960s. Or moving the family from city to city when my dad's job as a Time-Life correspondent took him across the country and to England and back. Or getting her master's in her late 40s and her Ph.D. at 60. But we never saw her sweat. (That's a trick I haven't learned.)

The night of our dinner party was my mom's 84th birthday. While I seriously doubt I made the whole thing look effortless, and though my mother was in Los Angeles while I was scrambling around our New York kitchen, I felt her spirit with me as I chopped and simmered and tried to make conversation at the same time.

I'm a lot like my dad in some obvious ways. I went into journalism straight out of college, just like he did—for Time-Life, even. We express ourselves best in writing. We have similar senses of humor, looking at the world from an oblique angle and inserting a sharp verbal blade.

But my mom is the unassuming role model who has demonstrated—not preached, but shown by gentle, loving example—the art of living a generous life. I have a long way to go, but I hope to get there someday.

Happy Birthday, Mom. Thank you.

The West Side Waltz

2009-10-06T23:55:00.000-04:00

When we arrived in New York a week ago today I discovered this picture, which had been slipped under our front door.

A thoughtful neighbor and fellow Hepburn devotee had taken it from the Talbot's catalog to share it with me. (Talbot's...Hepburn...no. But I digress.)

It was the perfect welcome, a smashing-of-the-champagne-bottle-over-the-prow kind of gesture.

Even though I don't officially live live here yet—there's the whole pesky matter of selling my condo in Los Angeles and, you know, moving—this feels like a practice live-here. I'm working, shopping for groceries, cooking (a little), going to the post office, meeting friends for dinner, doing laundry, buying toilet paper. And I'm a little giddy while I do it.

I keep taking out my camera phone to record moments. Everything seems photogenic here:

The architecture:

The pilings of a ghost pier in the Hudson River, marking a trail to Hoboken, New Jersey:

The High Line, the former elevated railway that's been transformed into landscaped walkway in the air, sailing over the trendy Meatpacking District and the grit of 10th Avenue:

And the view from our living room window, which I can't take my eyes off of, morning...

...afternoon...

...and night.

Plus, we do things here. It's really easy to do things here.

Yesterday, we went up to the New York Public Library's Performing Arts branch at Lincoln Center, where there was a special exhibit called "Katharine Hepburn: In Her Own Files." It featured photographs, letters, posters and scripts from Hepburn's theater career, beginning with her days as a student at Bryn Mawr through her late-life performances in Coco and A Matter of Gravity. There were some wonderful pieces in the exhibit, including a fan letter from Judy Garland (who added, "I'm getting fat, pregnant, and mean") and Hepburn's statement on the Kent State shootings, which she delivered to the audience after a performance of Coco ("Now you may call them rebels or rabble-rousers or anything you please. Nevertheless, they were our kids and our responsibility").

I was particularly struck by her typescripts from the plays she was in, marked in extraordinary detail in her own handwriting—notes on blocking or inflection or character. It seemed that almost every line of dialogue was accompanied by a notation she'd written on where to cross the stage or how to emphasize a word. Miss Hepburn was a star, a personality, a legend. But she also did the damn work.

After we left the exhibit, we walked 30 blocks down Columbus and 9th Avenues, then caught the subway home. At 8:15 last night, we headed out again. Let me pause here. I said, we went out in the afternoon, and then we went out again in the evening. At 8:15 at night. To have dinner and see a 9:40 p.m. movie. And then we walked home at midnight.

These are things we don't do much of in L.A. The going out twice in a day thing. The 30 blocks and the subway thing. The walking home at midnight.

It's been exhilarating. I'm grinning a lot, and whacking Stan on the shoulder, and saying "Isn't this great?"

But I also look forward to taking on a new role. I want to open the typescript, do my research, write my notations, deliver the performance. I'm ready to do the damn work.

Quality Street

2009-10-01T00:05:00.000-04:00

I woke up several times in the night wondering where I was. In the past seven days, we've spent six nights in four different beds—we were in Boston last week for a book-signing event at the Paul Revere House, followed by a couple of days visiting relatives in two locations on Cape Cod—so I guess it's not surprising that I'd open my eyes in the dark and have that gasping little intake of breath: "Where am I?"

Then I'd realize: I'm in New York, in the loft, in the double bed with the futon mattress we bought together on Broadway and 19th Street. And a warm wave of relief would wash over me. And then a second wave of relief as I realized that my gut reaction—spontaneous, instinctive, can't fake it—to finding myself in New York was Phew, I'm home.

I've been coming here, to this loft, for nine years now. First as a visitor, surrounded by the touchstones of two people's life together. (Two people, neither of whom was me.) Then I became a...what would you call it, a visiting resident? A resitor? A visident? I bought a toothbrush and left it in the bathroom. I bought a pair of shoes and left them in the closet. I brought some clothes from L.A. and let them live in New York. Soon I didn't have to pack anything when I came here, because I had enough t-shirts and turtlenecks and jeans and underwear to get by on for a week at a time.

And after a while, it began to feel homeish. We rearranged the furniture and set up a working space for me. We bought a new bed, and went on Craigslist to find a small dining table, which we got from a dance instructor/antique dealer off Herald Square and transported home in a cab. My life was still in Los Angeles, but I could travel to New York as someone who belonged here. Sort of. (Outside the apartment, I felt—truthfully, still feel—like an impostor; as if everyone I pass on the sidewalk can tell at one fast glance that I'm so not from here.)

On most of these trips, my beloved and I would come by ourselves, but it was important to me that The Child feel she had a place here, too. We brought her for her first visit in December of 2001; she was 10. It was cold, and my little L.A. girl bundled up so thoroughly that only the tip of her nose showed. She counted thoughtfully and announced, "I'm wearing eleven layers of clothes."

And her most familiar refrain: "Do we have to walk? Can't we take a caaaaab?"

But after a few more visits, she could guide the way from the subway back to the apartment. A couple years in, I let her walk the two blocks down to D'Agostino's supermarket by herself (fretting the whole 20 minutes until she returned with a bottle of ginger ale). Now she's been here in springs and summers and winters, and we'll meet here this Thanksgiving for the first time. It's homeish for her, too.

In the beginning, I was in pretty much a permanent state of giddiness over my new New York existence. A couple of years later, as the move east became less theoretical, I'd sometimes lie on the bed after a long day of concrete and asphalt and wonder, "How will I feel about this when I don't have pillowy-soft L.A. to return to?" I worried a little that I'd start complaining about the heat or the cold, the crowds, the long treks on hard sidewalks. Can't we take a cab?

But four weeks ago, when The Child and I flew into JFK and took a taxi into the city before heading up to college, and again yesterday, when the beloved and I trained in from New England, all that giddy excitement came right back. We rounded a corner and the famous skyline rose into view—the Chrysler Building, the old Pan Am building, and the Empire State Building, my personal North Star, guiding me back to where I wanted to be all along.

My life is shifting east, and I'm starting a new act, just as Miss Hepburn said.

State of the Union

2009-09-18T11:58:00.000-04:00

When The Child was two weeks old—and a weeny teeny thing she was, too, having been born three-and-a-half weeks early at 5 pounds, 5 ounces—I took her in to the pediatrician, a lovely Scottish man with a gentle demeanor and a dry sense of humor.

He picked her up, held her above his face, jiggled her a little, and seeing her squinchy expression, said, "Oh, it's a tough old world, isn't it?"

I laughed—something about the idea of that tiny little person with the bunched-up face thinking deep thoughts about this tough old world struck me as touchingly hilarious. And I laughed because in my new-mother over-anxiety, I'd been feeling it was a pretty tough old world, too.

I'd stand over her crib and look at this vulnerable little speck floating on an ocean of Sandra Boynton-themed bedding and start sobbing. "She doesn't even KNOW how helpless she is—and how totally inadequate I am!"

Despite me, she lived.

Now she's floating on an ocean of college life and I'm 3,000 miles away adjusting to what my sister called 'the new normal.' And I keep hearing Dr. MacLaren's voice, now paraphrasing himself, saying, "It's a funny old world, isn't it?"

When I went to college, I maybe talked to my family once a week on the phone and sent a few letters each quarter. My mom would mail me my dad's articles clipped from the newspaper, which, honestly, I mostly didn't read. (Because what could have been more important than my life?) I was so self-absorbed, I gave no thought to what they might have been feeling about my absence; and after a week or so of homesickness, I'm not sure I gave too much thought to home at all. Eek, sorry, Mom, Dad and Nancy!

So far in my daughter's two-week college career, she and I have communicated by phone, mail, text messages, e-mail and AOL Instant Messenger. And mental telepathy, though maybe I imagined that part.

As I said to her via text—or was it AIM—I'm trying not to go all Spanish Inquisitiony on her. I promise, I'm not calling every minute. And she hasn't downloaded Skype yet, so I'm not making judgments on the state of cleanliness in her dorm room.

It's just a funny world, where we bring these little creatures into existence and then act as if we don't want them to grow up. Where we send them off to college to be independent and then use every conceivable technology to make sure they're getting enough sleep or making friends.

But I can feel a transition happening, too. I drove along Santa Monica Boulevard the other day—as it happens, the same route The Child and I always took to school—without feeling sad for the loss of that time, just appreciative of what it was. I'm excited about her college life, but busy in my own. I want to hear about her adventures, but also anticipating the ones we'll be having as Stan and I prepare for the move to New York. I'm looking forward more than back.

I know mine is not really a tough old world; we have it pretty easy in the big scheme of things. It's just a rich soup of a world—funny, nerve-wracking, rewarding, infuriating, complicated and consuming.

As Miss Hepburn said in The African Queen, "I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!"

The Sea of Grass

2009-09-14T00:49:00.000-04:00

There's a wonderful piece in the Travel section of Sunday's Los Angeles Times, written by the paper's former copy editor Karin Esterhammer. The piece, compiled from Esterhammer's e-mails to family and friends, describes her new life in Vietnam. A year ago, her husband was between jobs, the couple was looking for a new experience in a less-expensive city, and they'd enjoyed previous visits to the country, so the Esterhammers and their 8-year-old son packed up and moved to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.

Meals cost 85 cents there. Cable TV—"with all the fancy channels"—is $4 a month. Myriad children play up and down the narrow alley of their working-class neighborhood. The language is impossible, but nevertheless, Esterhammer writes, "It's just so, so, so incredible here. I love, love, love it."

I read this piece with fascination and admiration and envy. And a little embarrassment that I've been yammering on about my impending move from one expensive, English-speaking American city to another—when here was adventure on a whole different scale. But mostly I just thoroughly enjoyed Esterhammer's almost-palpable glee over their new life.

How many times have we all fantasized about our other lives in our other places where we practice our other livelihoods? That place where the realities of this world have no bearing.

For a long time my go-to fantasy involved a small town on the rocky coast of Maine where I ran a little bookshop. Or where I sat in my rustic kitchen at a butcher-block table looking out at the Atlantic and writing mystery novels. It was usually a bit foggy there, but that was okay, because I had oversized fishermen's sweaters and hot mugs of tea to wrap my hands around.

Recently the scene has shifted a little, but not too much: Now I'm in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in the off-season when the oversized tourists have gone and the community is close-knit and mutually supportive. In this one, we live in a little cottage with sand on the front steps, and I ride my bike out to Herring Cove, or down to the coffee place on Commercial Street, or over to the P.O. to mail letters to my poor family members who are still stuck in L.A. traffic.

In the so-called real world, I'm still in L.A., gradually (too gradually) shedding my possessions and planning for our decampment to New York City. But work stress—and mortgage stress and dental stress and child-in-college stress—encroach on a daily basis, and sometimes I need a getaway quicker than I can get away.

Right now, I think I'm going to head to southern India, to the backwaters of Kerala, where we float languidly on a kettuvallam—a "tied boat" whose slats are lashed together with coir rope made from coconuts—through canals cut between coconut palms and banana trees and mangroves. It's sultry and lazy and the sky is ultra, ultra blue. And the nonexistent phone never rings.

Stage Door

2009-09-07T17:45:00.000-04:00

I started this post a couple of different times. First, in a rush of unexpected joy last Monday, after landing in New York at 11 p.m and catching sight of my old friend, the Empire State Building, as we rocketed toward the Midtown Tunnel in a yellow cab. After weeks of angst about change and loss, I had an illuminated reminder of all the excitement and promise of the future. I wanted to convey something about beginnings and hope and...

But I never finished that post; we had things to do, dorm room furnishings to shop for, a car to rent and a college move-in to complete. On Wednesday, we drove the three hours north to school under the most brilliant, humidity-free blue skies the east coast has enjoyed all summer. We rolled along two-lane country roads through lush green farmland, past red barns and cornfields to the campus. It was bucolic as hell.

Throughout the college orientation, I thought blog-posty thoughts while hopped-up on adrenaline and sleeplessness—wry observations about this ritual of tucking children into college as administration officials do their best to persuade nervous parents that their offspring will be well taken-care of while simultaneously running everyone ragged so that you're too tired to cry. But I had only my iPhone with me, and wasn't going to try to peck out a post with a clumsy index finger on that quirky keyboard.

I started another version last night after returning home, having flown through the smoky brown air to land at LAX. There was less exhilaration in this post—more fatigue and resignation. So now I'm starting all over.

I guess the point is that I have felt and continue to feel and will regularly cycle through all of these things—excitement followed by sadness chased by joy segueing into pragmatic, boots-on-the-ground marching forward.

The college psychologist who led the parent-orientation session on "Separation and Transition" told the story of a friend of hers who was puzzled by her own lack of emotion after taking her child to college. She was fine, if a little mechanical, during the first week and then the second, until she walked into the ladies' locker room at her gym and saw a woman breastfeeding her baby. That's when she started wailing. The lesson I took from this story: Don't go to the gym.

But as much as I joked about the school offering the parents grief counseling, I found that I was really grateful for the cornucopia of panel discussions and introductions and words of advice and assurances and reassurances that The Child would be surrounded by people who care about her and want her to succeed. After a while, you got the impression that she could go up to any stray dog on campus and be guided to where she needed to go.

So now The Child has been en-dormed—moved into her 8 x 10-ish single room, where she made her own bed and glared me away from lending decorating assistance—and is an official, fulltime, real-deal college student. Four days in, she's already exhausted from a surfeit of activities and an under-supply of sleep. Classes start on Wednesday, when "The Natural History of Infectious Diseases" and "Philosophy, Relativism and Truth" will come as a relaxing break from all the rock-climbing and scavenger hunts and bonding.

On Saturday morning, her dad and I hugged her on the front steps of her dorm as we prepared to go our separate ways back to California. She handed me a little package of two CD mixes she'd made for me, wrapped in a piece of paper on which she'd written "Try not to miss me too much" and "It's okay, mom. Everything's going to be alright." I drove off campus listening to Brandi Carlile singing, "I just want to be/Closer to you."

When I got back to New York, Stan and I went down to my favorite restaurant, 'ino on Bedford Street in the Village. I had a big glass of chilled Italian white wine and we shared plates of bruschetta topped with fresh sweet corn and sweet pea puree and asparagus with truffle oil and Parmesan... We drifted out the door and over to the river and up to the Meatpacking District, where we climbed the stairs to the High Line, the spectacular new park/boardwalk created atop an old abandoned elevated railway. I took pictures every which way.

The afternoon was glorious, and I enjoyed it all with giddy freedom—and a little guilt.

Now I'm back in L.A., living in a different time zone than my daughter. I went to Trader Joe's last night to restock the refrigerator and realized I no longer need a gallon of milk, a quart will do. I pick up the phone to text her and put it down again. I don't know how or what she's doing right this minute, and hope that means she's doing fine. Parents who've gone through this counsel that kids don't call when all is well—but to expect at some point the "toxic phone call" when they inform you that everything's a disaster. So there's that to look forward to!

Meanwhile, I've been fully oriented. My time is my own. What should I do first?

Suddenly, Last Summer

2009-08-31T01:09:00.000-04:00

Our living room looks like the lost luggage department of a minor midwest airline. There's a large charcoal gray suitcase standing next to the couch, an enormous blue duffel bag on wheels lying next to it, a black duffel bag gaping open in the middle of the room, and next to my chair, a black backpack with its front pocket flapped ajar.

Piles of clean t-shirts with logos on them—"CSI," "I'm not dead yet," "Deny everything"—sit patiently on the floor beside the black duffel. Several multicolored ballpoint pens are scattered on the rug. A small plastic turkey waits to be packed. In the middle of it all, our gigantic sheep-cat sits on his scratching board, waiting. (Just waiting. Nothing much goes on in his head, so just waits for stimulus, preferably of the edible variety.)

Tomorrow's the day we fly to New York; on Wednesday we'll rent a car and drive up to the college town. Thursday is move-in day. Friday is orientation, both for students and for parents. The kids will have bonding exercises and small-group discussions. The parents will receive grief counseling. I'm kidding, I think.

This afternoon we visited with my parents and my sister and her family. We celebrated my brother-in-law's birthday, ate El Pollo Loco chicken and apple pie. The younger kids swam in the pool. Just like normal, except for the one tiny thing that was different.

On the way home, my daughter and I stopped for a visit at the Getty Center, one of her favorite places in L.A. When we got off the tram, she borrowed my iPhone to start taking pictures of the angles and textures and plays of light on the marble. Today, L.A. was burning up, and the smoke clouds billowed dramatically behind the architecture. She took a picture.

In a way, this is what the whole day was like: a pleasant time, with this gigantic thing looming in the background.

We leave tomorrow, together. I come back alone next Sunday.

Yes, and how do you feel about this, Susan? I feel...honestly, I don't know anymore. I'm not weeping. I've made it through the last dinner-we'll-eat-at-this-table and the last-episode-of-"Psych"-we'll-watch-on-this-TV. I did the dishes calmly, while she went to her room to sort through her stuff and write her first blog post.

I feel flattened. Like a cartoon character who's been run over by the Acme delivery truck, then peeled off the pavement like a Post-it note.

She keeps poking me, hugging me, slinging her arm over my shoulder, asking "Are you doing all right?" She knows I'll miss her, she tells me. She checks my emotional vital signs—maybe worried that if the pressure builds too much I'll burst into hysterical wailing in an inappropriate place, like in front of the R.A. in her dorm. Maybe she's worried because I'm not crying.

But now she's doing the taking care of—as she's done many times before when I let stress undo me. Like when we were trying to return a rental car before closing time to Hoboken, New Jersey, in the middle of rush hour and I had no frigging idea where I was going. The pitch of my voice got higher each time I called the rental place for directions from our current incorrect location. "It's okay, Mom," my daughter would say soothingly. "It's going to be okay."

Once again, I don't quite have a clear picture of the road ahead, but she's telling me it's going to be all right. Really, I know it will be more than all right. It will be really, really good.

Wednesday morning we'll rent the car—in Hoboken, New Jersey—and point it north. She can even do some of the driving this time. Her dad will meet us in the college town that afternoon. Thursday, we'll move her into the dorm. I'll probably make her bed (I can't help myself) and fuss with things until she shoos me away. Friday, we'll each get a primer on what's in store for us.

Saturday morning, I'll hold on to her skinny little being and kiss her goodbye. Then I'll get in the rental car and find my way back to frigging Hoboken all by myself.

"Norman! The loons are teaching their baby to fly."

2009-08-25T16:46:00.000-04:00

In which I seek some bracing advice to deal with my last-ever-I-promise-absolutely-final bout of empty nest syndrome whining.

Me: Miss Hepburn, I...[snuffle]...oh, excuse me for crying.

KH: Whatever is the matter with you?

Me: I'm sorry, I'm just...[sob]...my daughter...

KH: Well, what is it? Speak up!

Me: She's leaving for college.

KH: Yes, and? Does she have a disease?

Me: Oh no, she—

KH: Is she pregnant?

Me: No, definitely not. But—

KH: Has she lost a limb?

Me: Oh gosh, no.

KH: I don't understand, then. What are you crying about?

Me: Well, she's leaving. Life is changing. I'll be here, and she'll be way over there.

KH: You must be joking.

Me: No, really. I have these moments of panic when I realize she's never going to take a shower in that bathroom ever again. It feels, I don't know, tragic.

KH: Tragic, my eye. Tragic is being labeled "box-office poison." For heaven's sake, put some backbone into it!

Me: Yes, I'm trying. I just—

KH: I spent more than three-quarters of my life living apart from my parents, and you didn't see me sniveling about it. Or them, either.

Me: That's true.

KH: We New Englanders are made of tougher stuff. What you need is a good swim in the Atlantic. In January.

Me: That's one idea.

KH: Invigorating! Clears your head!

Me: I'm sure. But, Miss Hepburn, didn't you ever feel sad when people went away, or when things seemed like they'd never be the same again?

KH: That's the point of life! Things move forward! You enjoy things while you have them, and when they change you enjoy the new things. Anything else is a waste of time.

Me: You make it sound so easy.

KH: It is easy! Comedy is hard.

Me: Hahaha.

KH: That's better.

Me: I'll try to look at it that way.

KH: Try, nothing. Just get up on that horse and go, go, go.

Me: Go, go, go.

KH: She loves you, doesn't she?

Me: She does, actually, yes.

KH: She knows you love her, doesn't she?

Me: Definitely.

KH: She'll enjoy college, won't she?

Me: I'm sure she will.

KH: Well, then. You're just moving on to Act II, scene 1, that's all. The players are the same, it's only the set that's different.

Me: I hadn't thought of it that way. Thank you, Miss Hepburn.

KH: Now stop sniffling, it's so unattractive. And what have you done with my brownies?

* * *

[Title courtesy "On Golden Pond"]

Spitfire

2009-08-20T13:03:00.000-04:00

For weeks I've been putting my daughter in the driver's seat of the car, trying to make sure she got enough practice to pass her driving test. Yesterday, she passed it. And she promptly handed me the keys to the car. "Now that I can drive, I don't have to drive," she said.

My daughter and I are alike in many ways; this is not one of them. I couldn't wait to drive. I was at the DMV on my 16th birthday, eager to get my license and gain my freedom. As I said here, I grew up on the top of a hill, with no way to get anywhere unless Mom or Dad (usually Mom) drove me. Getting a driver's license was like being handed a round-the-world plane ticket. Except that I had to ask Mom for the keys to the plane.

I went to high school across town, and most of my friends were a half-hour drive away. So I'd swoop along Sunset Boulevard in my mom's Datsun, blasting Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend" or David Bowie's "Cracked Actor" on the eight-track, windows wide open so as to clear out the cigarette smoke (sorry, Mom; the truth comes out). It was exhilarating, especially late at night, right up until the moment when I opened the front door of my house and found my mother, in her bathrobe, waiting for me in the living room, furious with anxiety.

Now, a little late, I have all kinds of empathy for my mother. The thought of sending my child out onto L.A.'s autobahn streets is almost paralyzing. Fortunately or unfortunately, it's not going to come up much.

She just turned 18 and two weeks from today will be moving into her college dorm on the other side of the country. She wanted a driver's license "in case of emergencies" and to have a photo ID, but she never really felt the need to drive. She spent four years using the L.A. bus system, even once navigating it to get to a friend's house in Glendale, a three-bus, two-hour one-way trip. (Yes, I picked her up afterwards.) That kind of adventure gave her the same feeling of independence that I couldn't achieve until I drove my mom's car. And then there's the fact that much of her socializing took place online. Who needed to go anywhere?

Not that she wasn't ecstatic about passing the driving test, and on her first attempt. She, who is always cool about everything and eats standardized tests for breakfast, was truly nervous about this one. She gritted her teeth and performed the Wallace shake—the one we've named after the twitchy little gesture of fear in Nick Park's wonderful "Wallace and Gromit" claymation films: elbows at your side, forearms raised, knuckles clenched, jittery waving back and forth of hands.

Yesterday, when she and the inspector drove back into the DMV parking lot and got out of the car, I held my breath until she caught my eye and gave a little smile and a thumbs-up. We high-fived in the DMV parking lot, and again at Baskin-Robbins, and again at Trader Joe's, where we bought the ingredients for her victory dinner (requested menu: tacos and artichokes).

As we drove (rather, as I drove) we rolled down the windows and blasted the CD she calls her "Hilarrible Mix"—lots of guilty-pleasure music like Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne.

When we got home, I discovered we were out of butter. "Want to take the keys and run to the store?" I asked her. She widened her eyes a bit and shook her head. She lay down and took a nap.

"Congratulations, she's a very good driver," the kindly driving inspector had said to me. "Now she's not a little girl anymore. You have to let her go."

Or not.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2009-08-16T01:38:00.000-04:00

Nothing good ever comes of waking up at 4 in the morning.

It's a mistake to start thinking at that hour; 4 a.m. produces bleak, dark, anxious thoughts. I can think the same thoughts at 4 in the afternoon and brush them off with a trilling Katharine Hepburn laugh: "Hahahahaha!" But at 4 in the morning, they give me a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, and a clutching sensation in my stomach.

That's how I woke up this morning—feeling like I was caught in a landslide with my feet slipping out from under me, about to be carried over a cliff. Oh, and my daughter leaves for college in two weeks.

Once upon a time, I swore I would never be one of those weepy mothers boo-hooing about their empty nests. "That's pathetic," I thought 20 years ago, when a friend admitted to crying constantly after her son left for college. "How weak."

And there I was this June, taking weepy stock of every "last" moment—last time dropping her off with her carpoolmate at 7 in the morning; last time picking her up from the bus stop after her crosstown ride back from school; last time stopping for a milk-tea boba in Westwood Village; last time driving toward home.

It was actually the mundanity of these moments that made me nostalgic—these were just the familiar routines of everyday life, the ones we'd taken for granted for four years. Now I was cataloguing them, pinning them to a board like museum specimens. And snuffling.

In this case, there is a one added twist to the garden variety empty-nest syndrome: As soon as my daughter leaves for college, I'm whipping her childhood home out from under her. That's what had me gasping for breath at 4 a.m.

In my "Little Women" post, I suggested that I'm pretty calm about the future, because I can envision a time when my adult daughter and I can hang out together, having lunch, shopping at Target, enjoying each other's company. Other posts have described my excitement about this new chapter in which I leave L.A. and finally move to New York, a city I've wanted to live in since I was eight. And that's all true. Especially at 4 in the afternoon.

But at 4 this morning, I was feeling something else—this huge undercurrent of guilt about taking away the home she's grown up in, the bedroom where she's spent hours doing homework and watching episodes of "Mythbusters" on her computer, the table where we ate dinner while the cat gnawed on her socked foot.

I don't always feel this way, and I don't think she always feels this way. We've agreed it's "weird" to think of this place not being here for us anymore. But we're both going toward something new and positive, toward adventures we've been anticipating for years. The loft in New York is familiar, almost a second home by now. She has a chest of clothes there, and books on the shelf. And her foot-fetishist cat will be there waiting when she comes down for long weekends.

People describe these vacillating emotions as a roller-coaster; I think of them more as a teeter-totter: down into the abyss when the sky is charcoal-gray and the moon is piercing the curtains, back up when the sun's overhead and the coffee's burbling in the pot.

You can hold two thoughts in your head at once, right? Sweet-and-sour; half-empty, half-full; jumbo shrimp. So I'm happy-sad, looking forward-looking back. Pathetic and weak—and excited and brave. It just depends what time of day you catch me.

The Lion in Winter

2009-08-12T15:59:00.000-04:00

I just read Molly Ringwald's nicely unexpected op-ed about John Hughes in today's New York Times. In it, Ringwald, who starred as a teenager in Hughes' most influential movies, says not only the things you think she'd say—that Hughes was a funny and generous mentor who changed her life—but also some things you wouldn't: that Hughes had a "heavy heart...prone to injury" and that "his grudges were almost supernatural things, enduring for years, even decades."

I was reminded of a funeral I went to recently. The service was led by an Irish priest who did two things I didn't anticipate: He made us laugh (nobody understands the resurrection, he says, "except God and a few Irish people") and he made me think.

"When someone dies," he said, "you don't just have to remember the good things. People have good stuff, but they also have other stuff. And sometimes the other stuff is much more interesting."

I loved that so much. The richness of a person isn't in his or her saintly qualities—the loving-wife-and-mother, pillar-of-the-community, devoted-family-man stuff of every newspaper obituary—but in their complexity and flawed charms. Like those of Nancy Lee Hixson of Danville, Ohio, whose unforgettable obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer read in part:

"Her homemade cider and wine were reputed to cause sudden stupor. She befriended countless stray dogs, cats, horses and the occasional goat. She was a nemesis to hunters, and an activist of unpopular, but just, causes. In short, she did everything enthusiastically, but nothing well."

The funeral got me thinking (in the narcissistic way that funerals do) about my "other stuff." And frankly, do I have enough of it?

Between my Catholic-school upbringing and the influence of my gentle, self-effacing mother, I've spent a lot of years being a good girl. I give other people the bigger helping. I let drivers into my lane. I listen more than I talk. It all makes me a likable person. And I like to be liked.

But wouldn't it be better to be a fascinating person? A provocative person? Memorable, controversial, prickly?

Asked to describe Katharine Hepburn, her friends and even her family would undoubtedly never have used the word "nice." She was impatient, strong-willed, defiantly egotistical. Who else would title her autobiography Me? She was also riveting and unforgettable.

I don't regret being a thoughtful or generous person; I think I'm both.

I do regret not being honest out of fear of hurting someone's feelings—and in the process, hurting both of us more. I regret getting myself into time-consuming, energy-draining, no-win situations because I didn't like to tell someone "No." I regret being too nice to people who didn't deserve it. I regret the times I didn't stand up for myself, or—much worse—the times I didn't stand up for someone else because I was desperate to avoid confrontation. It makes me feel a little sick to admit all this.

There aren't a lot of physical benefits to getting older (I'm thinking, thinking...okay, can't think of one), but there is one great mental benefit: You stop worrying so much about what people think.

I can't say I've changed overnight, but I am evolving. I still believe—in a non-New Agey kind of way—in putting out more positive energy than negative, but I like to think I no longer do it at the expense of honesty.

At 48-going-on-50, I no longer feel the need to make everyone like me. I launch into random conversations with strangers in check-out lines, not worrying if they might think I'm a little off. I speak my mind more and am definitely less nice to people who don't deserve it.

I don't really think too much about my own funeral (although I'll make sure James Taylor's You Can Close Your Eyes is on the soundtrack; that should get everyone working up a good cry). But I hope that by the time my time comes, I'll have given people enough "other stuff" to talk about.

"That Susan," I can only hope they'll say, "she was a lot of things, but she sure wasn't nice."

My, She Was Yar

2009-08-07T19:48:00.000-04:00

There are things I will not miss about Los Angeles. Here they are:

1. GAS-POWERED LEAF BLOWERS. Sorry, I had to yell to be heard over the noise of the frigging gas-powered leaf blower.

2. Drivers who are both hostile and idiotic.

3. Truly frightening walking advertisements for why you should never have plastic surgery.

4. Lime-green Hummers driven by see #2 above.

5. The 405 at any time of day or night, any day of the week.

6. Electronic billboards, especially the one advertising Los Angeles by using Larry King's grisly face, which would be reason enough to move.

7. Beverly Hills.

8. Our inurement to the homeless.

9. Lakermania.

10. The inevitable weighing of Things Worth Doing on the one hand versus the fatigue of braving crosstown rush-hour traffic to do them on the other—and the fact that the Things Worth Doing most often lose.

But there are things I will miss about Los Angeles. Here are some of them.

Sunsets from our living room window.

Ridiculous architecture.

A neighbor's wacky Christmas display. It gets wackier each year.

The view of the Pacific from the palisades in Santa Monica.

The Getty Center.

And the notes left by my daughter on the white board on our refrigerator, like the one reminding me that our foot-chewing cat needs more cat treats. There will be another refrigerator, and another white board. But there won't be this one.

In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant discuss the boat they once shared, the "True Love." They discuss her beauty, her agile responsiveness. "My, she was yar," Grant says.

Los Angeles is often unbeautiful, infuriating, even grotesque. I wouldn't ask anyone to love it. But there are pieces of it that mean something to me. I look at them and think, "My, that's yar."

Desk Set

2009-08-03T11:36:00.000-04:00

They say you learn from your mistakes, but what have I learned from my dirt-stained 900-pound couch? I learned that I have crappy taste in furniture.

Every piece of furniture in this place comes with a tale of woe. The bed that's so immovable we haven't been able to redecorate my daughter's room in 10 years. The wicker chairs that became the cat's favorite scratching posts. The cheap floor lamps that lean at drunken angles. The monstrous couch that's so big my own feet can't touch the floor. And it's my damn couch.

I really should do better than this.

As a teenager, I soaked myself in 1930s Hollywood glamour. I set my alarm to wake up for the 2 a.m. broadcast of Katharine Hepburn's Alice Adams or Bette Davis' The Little Foxes. I drove myself across L.A. to the old Vagabond revival movie theater to see double bills of Holiday and Bringing Up Baby; Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight; Top Hat and Flying Down to Rio. I paged slowly through our giant hardback copy of John Springer and Jack D. Hamilton's They Had Faces Then, an affectionate encyclopedia of the female stars of the '30s, lushly illustrated with black-and-white glamour shots.

I loved those movies and adored those actresses. The guys—Cary Grant and Clark Gable and Laurence Olivier—were pretty good, too, but my God, the women! Hepburn, Davis, Garbo, sexy Jean Harlow and sharp Ginger Rogers, cool Myrna Loy and comedic genius Carole Lombard. I affected their clipped, quasi-British accents as I talked to myself in the mirror, and imagined shimmering folds of fabric swishing around my legs as I strode across the bright yellow shag rug of my bedroom.

I ate up the dialogue, arch and witty, and the rapid-fire delivery. And I ogled the sets—the gleaming parquet floors, the white furniture, the penthouse suites, the sweeping staircases. It was a style to which I could quickly become accustomed.

Except that I have no style.

I wear battered blue jeans, not silver lamé cocktail gowns. I have wall-to-wall carpeting and mismatched, ill-fitting furniture. To call it eclectic would be too flattering. Somehow, I forgot to click and drag that Hollywood glamour into my own life.

One of the benefits of this impending move to New York is that I get a kind of do-over. The Salvation Army will come and (with a little begging on my part) take away the monster couch and the bed and the floor lamps. The wicker chairs may go out on the curb for whoever needs a quartet of scratching posts. I think the only thing we'll keep is our desks—which aren't desks, really, they're tables. Thin, simple drop-leaf tables with wide clean work surfaces, the better for creating new stories on.

And then we move into Stan's one-room loft in New York. Right off the bat, I'm inheriting more style and character than I've had in my previous four homes combined. Not to sound like a realtor's brochure ("It's Magnolia Bakery adjacent!"), but it's got exposed brick walls, slightly battered wood floors, 12-foot ceilings, a view of the Empire State Building. It's decorated with artwork and quirky tchotchkes from the dozens of trips Stan took with his late partner, Janet.

I realize that all this has nothing to do with me—I can't suddenly claim a sense of style just because I moved my bags in. But I feel like I've suddenly been told I can skip third grade and go straight into fourth. Like I've got a jump start on a whole different kind of life.

Maybe now, with the inspiration of New York, and the loft, and a new home with Stan, I can Hepburn it up a little. I can see things—or maybe what I mean is, I can finally see myself—in a new way. I can think outside the couch.

Little Women

2009-07-29T22:01:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think I've had a little preview of my future. What's surprising to me—me, who has spent the last year trying to hold on to time like a kid trying to stop a wave from going back out to sea—is that these glimpses have been strangely reassuring.

In early June, my daughter graduated from high school. Her high school, which was also my high school, has a longstanding tradition of holding its graduation ceremonies at the Hollywood Bowl, the girls wearing white dresses and holding red roses. The class sang Regina Spektor's The Call: "I'll come back/When you call me/No need to say goodbye."

I expected to sob through most of the ceremony. But instead, the ritual of the event felt like a true expression of that dreaded word "closure." It was an elegant punctuation mark on her high school career...and her childhood.

Sandy Banks, a columnist for the L.A. Times, once wrote that the moment your child goes off to college feels like "a referendum on your parenting." You've had your shot at forming, shaping, teaching your child—now it's too late. The kid's out of your grasp.

At several points during my daughter's senior year, that knowledge gave me almost physical pain. I regretted my mistakes. I lamented that she'd spent most of her entire childhood shuttling between two houses. I felt there was so much I should have taught her; that I should have provided a more...I don't know, thorough upbringing.

But somehow, watching that graduation ceremony—and seeing her joy in it—gave me a sense of completion, not loss. And I felt like I was getting a peek at her college graduation, after what I hope will be a very...thorough four years.

Today, I drove down to my ex-husband's house to pick up my daughter for lunch. We went out to a restaurant, we talked, we went shopping at Target (I treated), we got an ice-blended coffee (she treated). We put our arms around each other's shoulders as we walked across the parking lot.

Maybe it's wishful thinking; maybe I'm tempting fate. But I want to think it was a little preview of a future in which my adult daughter and her (older) mom hang out, enjoying each other's company, teaching each other stuff. The referendum's in the pudding. Or something.

I know that I have no idea how things are going to go from here. I can't shape things any more now than I could 18 years ago. But really, it doesn't matter. Even if the future plays out completely differently, I had it today, and I'm grateful.

Bringing Up Baby

2009-07-24T15:08:00.000-04:00

I grew up on the top of a hill, 20 minutes from civilization on either side. There were no sidewalks; there was no public transportation. I was completely dependent on my parents in order to get anywhere. My older brothers and sisters occasionally hitchhiked down the hill to Sunset Boulevard to catch a bus to the beach; but by the time I was old enough to do it, it had been discovered that hitchhiking, like smoking, was bad for you.

I really didn't think about this much when I was little. It was what was. All I knew was that I couldn't ride my bike too far in any direction because I'd end up going down a hill I'd never get back up again.

Then when I was about eight, I read The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright. Published in 1941, it was about four siblings—Rush, Mona, Miranda (Randy) and Oliver Melendy—who live in a brownstone in Manhattan.

Each Saturday, the kids pool their allowances (50 cents each, plus Oliver's dime), which one of the kids then uses to have an adventure somewhere in New York City. In 1941, you could have an adventure in New York City for $1.60.

Rush goes to the Metropolitan Opera to hear Siegfried, and finds an abandoned puppy on the way home. Mona scandalizes her family by getting a sophisticated haircut and a ruby-red manicure. Randy goes to see a collection of French paintings at an art gallery and discovers an amazing secret about a very old family friend. And Oliver, who was supposed to have an adult chaperone, sneaks out to see the circus at Madison Square Garden.

The Saturday exploits were fantastic—but for me, the true miracle lay in one tiny detail: In New York, you could walk right out of your house and have an adventure.

In New York, there were taxicabs honking outside your door, and snow, and a place called Central Park where you could rent a rowboat (and maybe fall in the lake), and people yelling funny epithets and crowds bustling down the sidewalks. There were sidewalks.

I fell in love with the Melendy family. (I wanted to be in the Melendy family; I even tried changing my name to Miranda for 15 minutes, but my fourth-grade teacher wasn't having it.) And I also fell in love with New York.

All my new what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-ups involved living in New York. I'd be a writer living in New York. I'd be an actress—like Katharine Hepburn—living in New York. I'd be some kind of single career woman living in New York.

Then my un-Katharine Hepburn nature took over. I went to college...in California. After graduation, I moved...back to Los Angeles. I got married. I got one job, then another. I had a child. The child started school. I got divorced. You know the drill.

Now the child is going to college. I have a partner who comes from...New York. He has an apartment in Greenwich Village. This fall, we're moving to...New York.

It took 40 years, but I'm finally getting in touch with my inner Melendy. It's time for an adventure.

Love Among the Ruins

2009-07-22T00:20:00.000-04:00

I'm living in a state of unKate. I'm not happy about this.

See this house? This is Katharine Hepburn's family estate on the coast of Connecticut. I do not live in this house.

I live in a condo in the middle of Los Angeles. I hate the word condo; it's repulsive. Maybe because it's one letter away from condom, which is another thing I don't want to live in.

The place is a wreck. We're moving this year—but not yet. My daughter is going to college—but not until next month. Two of us work at home—our projects are everywhere. The carpet is...oh god, don't even get me started on the carpet.

When I'm not laughing about this, which is about 30 percent of the time, I get depressed. I aspire to better than this. I aspire to a grand old white clapboard house with wood-plank floors and windows that open to a view of the Atlantic. Failing that, I aspire to a spartan one-room loft in Greenwich Village with brick walls and transvestite hookers shrieking outside the window in the middle of the night. That's where we'll be living in a few months. Just...not yet.

I'm not sure whether my grumpiness is really about the condom and the carpet—or whether it's the one-foot-on-the-dock, one-foot-on-the-rowboat sense of displacement I'm feeling.

We've lived in this place for 10 years. When we moved in, my daughter had just finished second grade. I remember wondering what color to paint her room and thinking to myself, 'Robin's-egg blue.'

I turned and asked her, "What color should we paint your room?"

She thought for a minute, then said, "Robin's-egg blue."

It's still robin's-egg blue, underneath the posters and the pictures and the postcards that have been taped to the wall. Her project this summer is to clear out all the old stuff she doesn't want anymore. The project is going...slowly.

Every week or so, I take a few boxes of clothing or household items or old toys to Goodwill. The pencil marks on the doorframe where we measured The Child's height will be painted over. I guess the Obama sign in the window will have to come down, too.

It's funny how you can be so eager to move forward into the new thing and still feel bereft about the loss of the old thing. (Not the carpet. I won't feel at all bereft when we lose that frigging carpet.)

I wonder if Katharine Hepburn felt this way in 1932 when she boarded the train that brought her west to Hollywood. When she landed on the station platform in Pasadena with red, swollen eyes, was it just because a cinder had flown into her eye in Albuquerque?

I'd like to think even Miss Hepburn felt a pang for the things left behind.

Morning Glory

2009-07-20T02:07:00.000-04:00

Whenever Stan goes to The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (or as we aging Westwood hipsters call it, The Bean—and if aging Westwood hipsters isn't a triple contradiction in terms, I don't know what is), he comes home and reports the theme of the day. Usually it's a wardrobe theme, like "men in suspenders" or "women in tight skirts and spike heels," though why he would notice those is beyond me. The theme is whatever he saw a lot of during the couple of hours he sat there.

My theme of the day is: generosity. I saw a lot of it today.

Really it started a few weeks ago, when my Twitter friend—okay, woops, sorry, have to branch off here into what my friend Bob Canzoneri would call a tributary:

This is not going to be a blog about Twitter. In an ideal world, this would be the last post in which I even mention Twitter. Not that I don't love Twitter. But talking about Twitter is unnecessary for people who are on it and annoying for people who aren't. So, no Twitter. Except this once.

A few weeks ago, my Twitter friend Bumble Ward (@bumbleward on Twitter) wrote and said, "Susan, do you have a blog?"

"Oh, thanks for asking, but no," I said. "Maybe someday!" I chirped. I think I even used the exclamation point, ick.

But really, I was amazed at the idea of someone apparently wanting to read more of what I'd written. Isn't that like asking to see someone's slideshow from their vacation in Wisconsin?

Okay, cut to the chase: I start this blog. I write to Bumble on Twitter to thank her for the inspiration. She writes back with congratulations.

A few minutes later, I see that Nancy Friedman (@fritinancy), she of the 1900 followers, has tweeted, "Excellent news: @susanchamplin has a new blog," and gives my url. Excellent news? The fact that I started a blog is excellent news?

Before I can process this astounding concept, I get comments from three more people—perfect strangers—about my blog. I think I was actually sweating at this point. Later in the day, @NewsyGal writes her own blog post about Katharine Hepburn and tweets that it was "inspired by @susanchamplin's blog... ." And @LibertyLndnGirl has offered advice on publicizing Stan's and my book.

All right, I know that for Twitter folks, this is nothing new. This is how Twitter works. But really, this isn't about Twitter. Twitter is just the enabler. But it starts with this extraordinary generosity of spirit that floats out there like dandelion seeds on a breeze. I am, to borrow the British expression, gobsmacked by the generosity of people who don't even know me in supporting my efforts.

Thank you all, so much. I'm grateful. I'm humbled. I'm sweating.

So Kate (can I call you Kate? No?), so Miss Hepburn: Thank you. You said, "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put into this world to rise above." And you got me to rise above my "Maybe someday!" nature and just do the damn thing. And look what happened—you got your name in print all over the place.

Not The Philadelphia Story

2009-07-18T14:34:00.000-04:00

I'm 48. That's a really weird thing to say. Ask anyone who's 48 and they'll probably say, "I'm forty-eight? God, that's weird." My daughter, an only child, goes to college this fall. Then my partner, Stan, and I will move from L.A., where I've lived almost my whole life, to New York.

I feel like I'm at this odd midway point, but I don't know how to assess what I'm seeing behind me or in front of me. I wanted to call this blog Halfway There, which felt both optimistic and fatalistic at the same time. Like my life is half over—or it's only half over. See? Hopeful! The name was taken, but that halfway-transitional-where-am-I sense is probably what will drive the posts on this blog. (And can I just mention in passing how odd and egotistical it feels to be writing a BLOG? For pete's sake, who cares? Discuss.)

So, why Katharine Hepburn? Because she's the anti-me. As a teenager, I worshiped what I saw as her independence, her willfulness, her seeming lack of care for what anyone thought or expected of her. She frolicked nude in a fountain at Bryn Mawr. This was all very not me. But I wished it were. (We're leaving aside here her slavish, self-denying devotion to Spencer Tracy; nevermind that.) She was the role model I measured myself against but never lived up to. But maybe I still can. I'm only 48.